My Husband Doesn’t Exist Chapter 09

My Husband Doesn’t Exist Chapter 09

Three months later. 

The verdict came down. 

First–degree murder. Life without the possibility of 

parole. 

I didn’t appeal. 

Sitting in the defendant’s chair, I saw Jenna’s 

parents. 

Their hair had gone white. They were gaunt. Wasted. 

Jenna’s mother stared at me, her eyes brimming 

with tears. 

Her voice was barely a rasp. 

“Why… Mara… what did Jenna ever do to you…” 

I kept my head down. I couldn’t look at her. 

When death is staring you in the face, every twisted justification collapses into the most pathetic excuse imaginable. 

What could I possibly tell her? 

That it was my pitiful, selfish jealousy? 

I killed the only person in this world who ever truly cared about me. 

They put me in a maximum–security single cell. 

The door here is iron too. Thick. Heavy. 

I finally have the absolute safety I always dreamed of. 

And I can never sleep again. 

Every time I close my eyes, the darkness lights up with Jenna’s face in those final moments. 

She just looks at me. Quiet. Still. 

The remorse is poison. It eats at me day and night 

without pause. 

I started to obsessively long for two years ago. 

For that six–hundred–dollar apartment with walls 

thin as paper. 

If I could turn back time. 

If that night I hadn’t reached for the marble 

bookend. 

If I could have just said thank you to Jenna, instead of hating her in secret. 

But there are no second chances in this world. 

There never are. 

Years later, on a gray afternoon, a fever tore 

through me inside my cell. My consciousness 

started slipping. 

The prison doctor came and went. The iron door 

closed with a sound like a sigh. 

My body was giving out. 

In the final second before everything went dark for 

good, the howling in my ears stopped. 

And what took its place was a sound from a long, 

long time ago. A knock on a thin wooden door. 

Jenna standing in the sunlight with a thermos, 

smiling at me. 

“Mara, open up! I made your favorite honey–glazed, 

ribs.” 

Jenna, I’m sorry. 

I’m sorry. 

I’m sorry… 

On the monitor, my heart rate flatlined. 

The world went permanently dark.