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What? There’s no way. We were together a few hours ago.
My protests remain unsaid when a few doctors and nurses walk inside, looking like a prim-and-proper private crew that someone like Eli—or Papa—would insist on hiring.
“How are you feeling, Mrs. King?” the doctor asks, and I search my surroundings for Aunt Elsa—Eli’s mum. Or maybe Aunt Astrid—Eli’s aunt. Or Eli’s grandmother. Those are the only Mrs. Kings I know.
I find none of them and redirect my gaze at the white-haired doctor, who’s watching me with that fake sympathy.
“Mrs. King?” he repeats.
“Who is he talking to?” I whisper to no one in particular. “Is Aunt Elsa around?”
“He’s talking to you, Ava,” Eli says with a cruel tilt to his lips. “We got married two years ago, remember?”
4
AVA
My jaw nearly hits the floor and my mouth remains hanging open for longer than socially acceptable.
I stare at the countless faces surrounding me, searching for the joke. The‘I got you.’The‘you didn’t see that coming, did you?’
Neither come.
“Mrs. King?” the doctor asks again while adjusting his gold-framed glasses.
My heart squeezes and beats in intervals of uncomfortable pain.
Something must be wrong. There’s no way I’m Mrs. King or that I married Eli two years ago.
I was floundering in fucking depression two years ago. He mocked, ridiculed, and humiliated me two years before that.
He taught me the valuable lesson to never love again.
There’s no way in hell I married him when I was nineteen or that Papa would have allowed it.
I release a burst of nervous laughter before it chokes and dies down amid concerned gazes from my parents, sympathetic looks from the doctors, and a cold glance from the devil himself.
“Good one,” I say with my usual cheerful energy. “Almost got me there. I don’t know what I did to piss you off this time, considering you’re always such a joy to be around, but I think you took it too far.”
Eli’s eyes narrow the slightest bit and I think I catch a muscle clenching in his jaw.
“Mrs. King,” the impressively groomed doctor says. “Can you start by telling us what year we’re in?”
“Ava. It’s Ava. Stop calling me Mrs.…that!” I snap.
“It’s okay.” Mama strokes my shoulder. “Try to relax, hon.”
I realize my fingers are clenched in the bedsheets and my palms sting. I slowly release them and frown when I find my nails short and bare. I’ve always had a shade of pink on my nails and toenails since I was fifteen.
It’s impossible that I’ve kept them bare.
Did the hospital remove my nail polish when I was admitted? That seems trivial and quite bizarre.
“I need this entire thing to stop.” I sound more determined than I feel. “I’m not married to that prick and I sure as hell am not Mrs. anything. I’m only twenty-one, for God’s sake.”
The sudden tension in the room slaps me across the face and I freeze upon catching the note of horror in my parents' expression.
“W-what?” I sound terrified to my ears. “What’s wrong?”
