Chapter 6
The sound of the axe striking the coffin lid was the loudest thing Rosa had ever heard in her life.
Wood split with a sharp, splintering crack that seemed to shudder through the marble floor and up through the soles of her shoes. Someone screamed — a high, ragged sound she didn't have time to place a face to. Chairs scraped backward across the floor. The priest stumbled off the small dais, prayer book falling from his hands. Rosa registered all of it as background noise, distant weather happening to other people, while the only thing that mattered was the widening crack in the white-painted wood in front of her.
Gerald reached her before the second swing. His hand closed around her upper arm, hard enough to bruise, his face inches from hers, spit flying with the force of his words. "Stop this insanity, you're going to ruin—" He caught himself before the sentence finished, but Rosa heard the shape of it anyway. *You're going to ruin everything.*
She wrenched her arm free and shoved him back with her shoulder, the way she'd once shoved a drunk uncle away from her mother at a party twenty years ago, muscle memory from an entirely different life surfacing at exactly the moment she needed it. Gerald stumbled into the front pew. Somewhere behind her, she heard Dr. Fenwick's voice, thin and panicked, saying her name like a warning.
She dropped to her knees at the broken lid, splinters biting into her palms, and pressed her ear against the cracked wood the way she used to press her ear against Mateo's chest when he was an infant and she needed, more than she needed air, to hear the small stubborn evidence of a heartbeat.
The room had gone silent in the particular way that only total shock can produce — even Gerald frozen where he'd stumbled, even the priest silent on the floor where his book had fallen.
"Listen," Rosa said, and the word came out as barely more than breath.
At first, nothing. The hum of the ventilation system. Someone's ragged, frightened breathing three rows back. Rosa's own pulse roaring in her ears loud enough to drown out anything smaller.
Then — small, muffled, unmistakable — a tap. A single knuckle-soft sound against wood, coming from somewhere inside the shattered coffin.
Rosa's whole body went still.
A second tap followed, louder, more deliberate, as though whoever made it had heard the axe and understood, on some buried, half-conscious level, that this was the moment someone was finally, finally listening.
Rosa lifted her head. Her face, when the room saw it clearly for the first time since she'd picked up the axe, was not the face of a madwoman. It was the face of someone who had been right, and wished with her whole body that she hadn't been.
May you like
"She's still alive," she said, and this time her voice broke completely, tears spilling freely down her cheeks. "Somebody help me — she's still alive in there!"
For one endless second, nobody in that room moved at all.
