Instead, my husband stepped over my collapsed body, the way you might step over a spill on the floor, and he knelt down beside Selina, and he draped his own jacket tenderly over her shoulders.
“It’s okay now,” he whispered to her, gently, lovingly.
And Selina, safe in his care, looked over his shoulder at me, where I lay bleeding on the rug of my own home.
And she smiled.
That smile, more than the knife, more than the betrayal, is the thing I have never been able to forget.
Because in it I saw the whole truth at once: that this had been planned, that the scratch was manufactured, that Selina had come to my house not for comfort but to orchestrate exactly this, and that the man I had given my life to had just tried to end mine at the suggestion of a woman who was, in that moment, smiling at me over his shoulder.
And something in me, even then, even dying, refused.
I have wondered, since, what exactly it was that refused, in that moment, when refusal seemed so pointless, when I believed I had seconds to live and nothing to gain by resisting.
And I have come to think it was not the will to live, exactly, though that was part of it.
It was something more specific and more stubborn: the refusal to let a lie be the last thing written about my life.
Because I understood, in the clarity of that terrible moment, seeing Selina’s smile, that they were not only going to kill me.
They were going to erase me, and worse, they were going to replace me, in the record, with a lie.
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