Chapter 6 - The Knock at Six in the Morning

It was Adrian's mother, Margaret Vale. She stood on the porch holding a paper grocery bag and wearing the pearl earrings she'd worn to our wedding. Two uniformed officers waited beside her, polite and visibly confused.

"I brought your medication," she said through the door. "You left it at home."

I wasn't on any medication. That was the point. The bottle visible at the top of her bag bore my name, a prescription label, and a dosage I'd never seen.

Noah spoke to the officers through the screen door, showed his identification, and asked them to verify the welfare request. Margaret kept her gaze fixed on me. When she smiled, I heard Adrian's voice in it.

"Honey, this is embarrassing. Let us take you home."

"You knew what he was doing," I said.

"Marriages get difficult."

"He hurt me."

One of the officers looked sharply at the bruises on my face. Margaret's smile tightened.

"She's always had a flair for drama. Her mother was the same way."

Dad stepped into the hall. "Leave."

Margaret's grocery bag fell from her hands. A prescription bottle rolled across the porch, tapping against an officer's boot. The officer picked it up. The printed physician's name was Dr. Evelyn Shaw.

"I need a statement about this," he said.

Margaret stopped playing the concerned mother. "You people have no idea whose lives you're interfering with."

She climbed into her car and drove away. Noah photographed the bottle, and the officers recorded my account. For the first time, there was a report describing what had actually happened inside my marriage.

Ruth locked the door after they left. "We have to move. Margaret was testing how fast we could be found."

But I couldn't stop staring at the prescription label. Printed beneath the dosage was a pharmacy routing number ending in 04117—the code from my mother's note.

I called the pharmacy line. An automated voice asked for a patient access code. I typed the five digits.

A recorded message answered: "Archive request accepted. Scheduled destruction: 6:00 p.m."

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There were eleven hours left.

THE DOORS SHE OPENED •