I Died In His Sick Game novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Ten Months
After ten months marooned with her daughter, Abby pushes Tilly's raft past the sharks and sinks; as a ghost she watches her husband blame her for starving their child, until his crew drains the island's lake and finds a woman's body.
After ten months on the island, I put my daughter on a raft and pushed her out to sea.
Tilly was four. She weighed about as much as a bag of flour.
Her fever had been climbing for three days.
I'd lashed the raft together from fish camp boards and a torn tarp. I laid her on it and tucked the tarp around her and kissed her hot forehead.
"Hold on to the rope, baby. Don't let go."
"Are we going to Daddy?"
"Yes," I said. "We're going to Daddy."
Then I waded into the bay and started kicking.
The water was cold in a way the sun never fixed.
Out past the mangroves, three gray fins turned in a slow circle. They had been circling for ten months.
Every time I'd tried to swim for help, they came for me.
I watched them now and kicked harder.
When my legs gave out, I found something left in my arms. I shoved the raft with all of it, out toward the line of white water at the edge of the bay.
It slid away from me on a swell.
I let go.
I sank.
It was quiet down there. I closed my eyes and waited for teeth.
Light came instead, white and huge through the water.
Then I was above it all, floating in the air, looking down.
A long white yacht sat just past the reef, where I'd never been able to see it.
My husband walked out onto the deck.
Bradley, in a linen shirt, his hair perfect.
Kendra Vose was holding his arm. My best friend since we were nine years old in the same foster home.
Bradley looked down at the bay.
"There you go, sweetheart," he told her. "She slapped you once, so she did a year out here. Well, ten months. Happy now?"
He patted her hand.
"I'll make her apologize, and we'll put all this behind us."
Up on the bridge, the radio crackled.
"Thurlow yacht, this is Nan Sayward on the crab boat, relaying for my brother. Eli Sayward, the shark lab. He says your fins out there aren't sharks, and there's something in the water. Do you copy?"
Bradley's captain leaned out. "Sir? It's that Sayward guy again."
"Ignore him," Bradley said.
Then he saw the raft bump against the reef.
He frowned and leaned over the rail.
"Is that Tilly? Where's her mother?"
Down in the bay, the water had already gone flat and glassy.
My body was drifting down into the dark, very slowly, my hair floating up around my face.
I laughed. It came out of me.
Ten months of eating berries and roots and crabs. Ten months of keeping our daughter alive on a rock.
It had been a lesson.
"Mommy," Tilly whispered, when the crew pulled her aboard. "Save Mommy."
Her cracked lips kept moving. She pointed at the water.
Then her eyes rolled back, and she went limp in Bradley's arms.
I screamed and threw myself at her.
I went straight through her.
I looked at my hands. I could see the deck through them.
"Get a doctor!" Bradley was running. "Get the ambulance to the dock now!"
I followed them all the way to the hospital in Naples.
I didn't seem to have a choice.
In the emergency room, Bradley touched Tilly's arm and felt the bones.
His face went gray.
"I had supplies dropped on that island every month," he said. "Every single month. Couldn't Abby even be bothered to look for them?"
The food came for three months.
After that, nothing.
On the worst week, when it didn't rain, I cut my arm with a shell while Tilly slept so she'd have something wet to drink.
Kendra dabbed her eyes.
"Oh, Bradley. When things get hard, not every mother is strong enough. Maybe she kept the food for herself."
"Of course," Bradley said. "Of course she did."
He didn't see the little smile on Kendra's mouth.
I saw it.
A doctor came out with a clipboard.
"Mr. Thurlow, there was nothing in your daughter's stomach but grass and wild berries. She's in a coma. We'll know more in the morning."
"Grass," Bradley repeated.
His phone buzzed.
He read it and punched the wall so hard the plaster cracked.
It was a text from an unknown number, signed with my name.
"I hope you and Kendra burn. You made me starve her. You deserve this."
"She's faking her death to ruin me," he said. "She wants the papers to call me a monster."
He didn't notice the handwriting in the photo wasn't mine.
In college we'd written each other a hundred letters. He used to brag that he could forge my writing better than I could write it.
Ten months ago, I'd come home early from a weekend at the beach with Tilly and found Kendra naked under him on our living room sofa.
I went for them both, screaming.
Bradley shoved me to the floor.
"Stop being hysterical. I had a few drinks. Everybody makes mistakes."
I picked up Tilly and walked to the door.
He caught my wrist. "You hit Kendra. You're not leaving until you apologize to her."
"I want a divorce," I said.
I slept with Tilly at a motel off the highway that night.
I woke up on a rock in the sea.
Now his mother came clicking down the hospital hallway in her good shoes.
"Still no Abby? File for desertion, Bradley. Divorce her. She couldn't even give you a son. She's got no family, nobody. Kendra's right here."
Kendra blushed and looked at the floor.
"I'm not divorcing her yet," Bradley said. "When she shows her face, I want her to look me in the eye first."
His phone rang.
It was the site manager on the island.
"Sir, we're draining the lake for the resort pool like you asked."
"Then drain it."
He hung up.
He looked at Tilly through the glass for a long time.
Then the door banged open, and his assistant stood there, shaking, holding his phone.
"Sir. They drained the lake on the island."
He swallowed.
"There's a woman's body in it."
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