Chapter 5: The Celebration That Cuts Deeper
The backyard party swirled around Dominic, a current of laughter and the sizzle of meat on the grill that he couldn’t navigate. His eyes were anchored to Catalina across the lawn, leaning against the fence as Mina hugged her legs. Catalina smiled down at their daughter, but the smile was a tight, practiced line. When Mina, giggling, wrapped her little arms higher around Catalina’s thighs, she flinched.
It was a minute recoil, a hitch in her breath Dominic felt in his own lungs. She bit her lower lip, hard, and looked away into the middle distance.
Brian, holding two sweating beers, appeared at Dominic’s side, following his gaze. “She okay, man? It’s like ninety degrees and she’s in a long-sleeve henley.”
The observation was casual, friendly. Innocent. It landed on Dominic like a lit match. The memory of the locked bathroom door, the silent panic through the walls, the diary’s desperate script, collided with the sight of Catalina hiding fresh wounds under July cotton.
He looked down at the full beer can in his hand. His grip tightened. The aluminum whined, then crumpled inward with a wet crack, foaming liquid spurting over his knuckles. The sound was sickeningly familiar, like a bone giving way.
Brian took a half-step back. “Whoa.”
Dominic didn’t hear him. He was already moving, striding across the grass, the crushed ruin of the can dripping from his fist. The party noise faded into a dull roar. He stopped in front of Catalina, his broad frame blocking the sun. Mina looked up, her smile fading.
“We need to talk,” Dominic said, his voice low. “Now.”
The smell of spilled beer bit the air between them. Catalina’s gaze flicked from his crushed hand to his face, her own expression cooling into a mask of defensive calm. “What’s the emergency, Dom? The burgers burning?”
“Don’t,” he said, the word rough. He nodded toward the house. “Inside.”
Mina clung tighter to Catalina’s leg, sensing the shift. “Daddy mad?”
“No, baby,” Catalina soothed, her voice softening only for her daughter. She peeled Mina’s arms away and lifted her, using the child as a physical buffer. “Daddy’s just being dramatic.”
She brushed past him, her shoulder clipping his, and carried Mina toward the back door. The music from the party faded as they entered the kitchen’s relative quiet, the fluorescent light harsh after the twilight glow. Dominic followed, shutting the door firmly on the sounds of Brian and Mia’s confused voices.
He watched her set Mina down with practiced care. “Show me your arms.”
“Or what?” Catalina asked, not turning around, her voice a flat challenge. She opened the refrigerator and pulled out a juice box for Mina, her movements deliberate.
“Don’t make me ask again,” Dominic said, his voice dropping to a whisper that vibrated with restraint.
Catalina finally turned, her eyes meeting his over Mina’s head as the child sucked her drink. The defiance in her gaze was brittle, a thin glaze over sheer exhaustion. She slowly, deliberately, rolled up the left sleeve of her henley to the elbow.
A fresh, precise line of scabbed cuts marched from her wrist upward, a grotesque ladder etched into her skin. They were neat, methodical. New.
Dominic’s breath left him in a rush, as if he’d been struck. The visual proof was worse than his imagining. “You promised you’d stop.”
“I promised I wouldn’t finish the job on the bathroom floor,” she corrected, her tone icy and precise. “I never said anything about maintenance.”
Mina, oblivious, held up her juice box. “All done, Mama.”
Catalina looked down, the cold mask melting into something genuinely tender. “Good girl.” She was compartmentalizing, a skill she’d perfected. She could love their daughter fiercely in one moment and systematically harm herself in the next.
Dominic understood then, with a sinking clarity, that her secret wasn’t the cuts. It was the compartmentalization itself. She was borrowing time, piece by piece, from a future she wasn't sure she wanted.
Dominic stared at the fresh wounds, a cold fury tightening his throat. He knelt, his voice softening only for Mina. “Babygirl, go out and play with Aunt Mia.”
“Okay?” Mina asked, her small brow furrowed.
“Okay,” Dominic confirmed, giving her a gentle nudge toward the back door. She went, clutching her empty juice box, the screen door slapping shut behind her.
The silence she left was immense and brittle. He turned his gaze back to Catalina, who hadn’t moved. “Why?”
Catalina let out a sharp, hollow laugh. “You’re asking me why?” She yanked her sleeve down, covering the evidence. “It hurts me to hear you with other women. And because of how violated I felt after we had sex, Dom.”
The words hung, naked and brutal. Dominic flinched as if struck. “Violated.” The word was a foreign object in his mouth.
“Yes.” Her eyes were glistening now, not with tears, but with a hard, cutting lucidity. “It wasn’t some perfect thing. It was a fucking crime scene, and we’re both still living in it.” She gestured vaguely at her covered arms. “This just… cleans it up for a minute.”
Dominic took a step back, his shoulder hitting the refrigerator door. The party sounds outside were a muffled, mocking echo of a normal life. He had no defense. The memory of her in the desert, of the frantic, desperate coupling in the hallway, flooded back, tainted now by her pain.
He’d thought it was a shared secret. He understood now it was a shared wound, and she was the only one bleeding. “I don’t know how to fix this,” he said, the admission leaving him hollow.
“You can’t,” she whispered, the anger draining, leaving only exhaustion. “You just have to live with what we did.”
“You just have to live with what we did.”
She said it like it was simple, like he was choosing to carry a stone in his shoe. He looked at her bandaged arms, then at her face, and saw only the flat resolve of a prisoner who’d accepted her sentence. The fridge motor kicked on with a low hum beside him.
“I am living with it,” he said, the words gravel in his throat. “Every goddamn day.”
Catalina shook her head, a sharp, dismissive jerk of her chin. “You’re not. You’re burying it under engines and bad perfume.” She leaned against the counter, her weight on her palms. “I can’t do that. It sits on me.”
He wanted to reach for her, to bridge the chasm his own hands had helped dig. He didn’t move. “Then tell me what to do.”
A bitter smile touched her lips. “There’s nothing to do.” She pushed off the counter, her gaze dropping to the linoleum floor between them. “And you have to live with it if I am pregnant again.”
The words didn’t land; they detonated. The party sounds outside vanished into a high-pitched silence. Dominic’s vision tunneled, the kitchen shrinking to the point of her mouth where those syllables had formed. Pregnant. Again.
His mind raced backwards—the heat, the recklessness, the lack of any thought beyond the moment. A cold wave of nausea rolled through his gut. He saw Mina’s face, then imagined another, a ghost from a future they could never claim.
He must have made a sound, a strangled inhale. Catalina watched him, studying the collapse in his eyes with a frightening detachment. “Yeah,” she said softly, answering the question he couldn’t form. “That’s what I thought.”
The word pregnant seemed to hang in the kitchen air, thicker than the smell of grilled meat seeping through the walls. Dominic’s hand, still damp from the crushed beer, came up to press hard against his mouth as if to force the reality back inside.
He stared at her, at the defiant set of her jaw that couldn’t mask the sheer terror in her eyes. His mind, usually so quick with a plan, with a fix, went blank and silent. Another child. Another secret with her face, his eyes, living in the shadow of a lie so massive it had its own gravity.
“Say something,” Catalina whispered, the challenge gone from her voice, replaced by a hollowed-out exhaustion.
“I’m thinking,” he managed, the words rough. He was calculating months, logistics, the bewildered looks from Brian and Mia, the sheer impossibility of hiding another pregnancy, another baby. The weight of it pressed down on his shoulders, a physical strain.
“Don’t think,” she said, her voice gaining a sharp, brittle edge. “Just react. That’s what we’re good at, right? Reacting.” She crossed her arms, her fingers digging into the fabric over the fresh cuts. “So here it is. If you want nothing to do with the child, I will gladly leave. You can have Mina. I will have the new baby, if I am pregnant.”
She laid the terms out like a dealer splitting a deck, clean and ruthless. The offer was a guillotine blade, severing their tangled lives into two neat, impossible pieces. Him and Mina. Her and a ghost.
It was the most terrifying thing she’d ever said. The casual dismemberment of their family. Dominic felt something primal crack open in his chest, a hot, surging refusal. “No.”
“No?” she echoed, a bitter laugh escaping her. “You don’t get to say no to this, Dom. You don’t get to control it. This is the mess. This is the crime scene. You take your half and I’ll take mine.”
“They’re not halves!” The force of his own voice startled him, a raw shout that felt ripped from his throat. He stepped toward her, invading the space she was trying to hold. “They’re children. Our children. You don’t get to cut them in two because you’re scared.”
“Because I’m scared?” Her eyes blazed, all the cold detachment burning away into pure fury. “You’re the one who can’t even look at me most days. You’re the one who fucks strangers to forget what we did.” She jabbed a finger toward the window, toward the sound of the party. “You think I don’t hear it? You think I don’t know?”
He caught her wrist, his fingers closing over the bandaged skin beneath the sleeve. She stiffened but didn’t pull away, her breath coming in short, sharp pulls. The anger between them was a live wire, humming and dangerous.
“Then stop,” he hissed, his face close to hers. His grip wasn’t tight, but it was an anchor. “Stop cutting. Stop offering to leave. Stop acting like you’re the only one drowning here.”
Tears, hot and sudden, welled in her eyes but didn’t fall. “What would you have me do, Dominic?” The question was a plea, stripped of all its armor. “Pretend? Like you do? Smile at the barbecue while my skin is on fire?”
He had no answer for that. The silence stretched, filled only by the thump of bass from outside and the frantic beat of his own heart. He was still holding her wrist. He could feel the delicate bones, the raised lines beneath the cotton.
Slowly, carefully, he turned her arm, pushing the sleeve up past her elbow once more. The ladder of marks was an accusation in the sterile kitchen light. He traced a thumb just beside the newest wound, not touching it, hovering over the vulnerable skin.
She watched him, completely still. “Don’t,” she whispered, but there was no force behind it.
“I’m not leaving,” he said, the statement quiet and absolute. “You’re not leaving. Mina’s not leaving.” He finally met her gaze, holding it. “And if there’s another baby, it’s not leaving either.”
Catalina searched his face, looking for the lie, the hesitation. She found only a stubborn, exhausted certainty that mirrored her own. The fight bled out of her shoulders, leaving her leaning into the space between them.
“You don’t know that,” she breathed. “You can’t promise that.”
“Watch me,” he said.
The back door swung open with a slap, flooding the kitchen with a burst of music and laughter. Mia stood there, Mina on her hip, her smile fading as she took in the scene: her brother holding her sister’s arm, their faces inches apart, a history of wreckage hanging in the air between them.
“Everything okay in here?” Mia asked, her voice too bright. “You two are missing the party.”
Catalina pulled her arm from Dominic’s grasp, smoothing her sleeve down with a quick, practiced motion. She turned toward her sister, and the mask slid back into place so completely it was like the previous five minutes had never happened.
“Yeah, fine,” Catalina said, her voice miraculously light. “Just arguing about the torque on the Chevelle. You know how he gets.”
She walked forward and took Mina from Mia, settling the girl on her own hip. Mina’s small hand patted Catalina’s cheek. “Mama sad?”
“No, baby,” Catalina said, kissing her forehead. “Mama’s not sad.” She glanced back at Dominic, just once. Her eyes held no answers, only the same relentless, shared problem. “Let’s go get some cake.”
“Let’s go get some cake.”
The party noise swallowed them again, a wave of chatter and music that felt obscene. Catalina moved through the crowd with Mina, a fixed, pleasant smile on her face as she accepted a paper plate from Brian. Dominic watched her from across the deck, his knuckles stinging from the crushed can. She was a ghost at the feast, perfectly composed.
He saw Mia studying him, her brow furrowed with a sibling’s intuitive concern. He grabbed another beer, snapping the tab with more force than necessary, and joined the group around the grill. He talked about camshafts and intake manifolds, his voice too loud. He was building a wall of normalcy, brick by brick, while his mind screamed.
Hours bled away. The sun set, and strings of Edison bulbs glowed like trapped fireflies. Mina eventually slumped against Catalina’s shoulder, eyelids heavy with frosting and fatigue. “Time for bed, mija,” Catalina murmured, standing.
She carried the sleeping girl inside, weaving through the remaining guests with a quiet word here and there. Dominic waited a full five minutes, finishing a pointless conversation with Brian about carburetors, before he followed.
The house was quieter, the thump of the bass muted through the walls. He climbed the stairs, each step feeling heavier than the last. The door to Mina’s room was ajar, a soft nightlight spilling onto the hallway runner.
He paused at the threshold. Catalina was leaning over the crib, tucking a blanket around Mina’s small form. Her profile in the dim light was softened, all the sharp defiance gone, replaced by a weariness that seemed ancient. She straightened up and turned, noticing him in the doorway.
They stood in silence for a moment, the only sound Mina’s deep, even breathing. Then, sleepily, Mina stirred. Her eyes fluttered open, landing on Catalina, then drifting to Dominic in the doorway.
“Mama?” Mina’s voice was thick with sleep.
“Right here, baby,” Catalina whispered, brushing hair from her forehead.
Mina’s little hand reached out, patting Catalina’s cheek. Then her gaze found Dominic again. “Daddy here?”
“Yeah,” Dominic said, his voice rough. “I’m here.”
Mina smiled, a sleepy, contented curve of her lips. Her eyes closed. Just as Catalina began to pull away, Mina murmured, the words slurred and soft, but perfectly clear. “Want Mommy and Daddy bring me to bed.”
Catalina froze, her hand still on the crib rail. The request, innocent and logical in a two-year-old’s world, hung in the air like a struck chord.
“After I sleeps,” Mina added, as if clarifying a very important point, before surrendering completely to sleep.
Catalina’s shoulders tensed. She didn’t look at Dominic. She simply turned and walked out of the room, past him, her shoulder brushing his arm. He watched her go down the hall to her own bedroom, the door closing behind her with a soft, definitive click.
He stood there for a long minute, listening to his daughter breathe. The party downstairs was a distant rumble. He looked at Mina’s peaceful face, her simple demand echoing. Mommy and Daddy.
He pushed off the doorframe and walked to Catalina’s room. He didn’t knock. He opened the door and stepped inside.
She was at her dresser, her back to him, rummaging in the top drawer. She pulled out a small, rectangular box, its commercial packaging jarringly bright against the muted room. She stared at it in her hand as if holding a live grenade.
Without a word, she turned and walked into her connected bathroom. The light flicked on, harsh and clinical.
Dominic followed, stopping in the bathroom doorway. He watched her tear open the box with a fierceness that betrayed her calm. She pulled out the plastic wand, read the instructions on the leaflet once with a swift, scanning glance, then discarded the paper.
She looked at him then, finally meeting his eyes. Her expression was unreadable, a flat surface over a churning depth. “You should leave,” she said, but her voice lacked conviction. It was a formality.
“No,” he said, his own voice quiet. He leaned against the doorframe, crossing his arms, a solid barrier. He would not be moved. Not this time.
A faint, bitter smile touched her lips. She turned to the toilet, lid down, and performed the test with a robotic efficiency. When it was done, she placed the plastic stick on the edge of the sink. The digital window was blank, a slow countdown beginning.
She leaned back against the counter, her arms crossed tightly over her stomach, facing him. The bathroom was too small for this. The air was too still. They could hear the faint tick-tick-tick of the fan and the distant, hollow laughter from the party below.
Dominic’s gaze kept snapping from her pale, set face to the white stick on the sink. The waiting was a physical pressure, a swelling silence. He remembered the cold tile of this same bathroom weeks ago, the bead of blood. This was a different kind of incision.
“What will you do?” he asked, the question ripping through the quiet.
“I don’t know.” Her answer was immediate, hollow. She looked at the test, then back at him. “What will you do?”
He had promised, downstairs, that he wouldn’t leave. The words felt like stones in his mouth now, weighty and real. “I told you,” he said. “We face it.”
She gave a short, humorless laugh. “Face it. Right.” She looked down at her arms, covered by her sleeves. “We’re so good at facing things.”
A soft beep pierced the room, sharp as a needle.
Both of them flinched. Catalina’s eyes snapped to the sink. Dominic pushed off the doorframe, taking a half-step into the room.
She didn’t move. She just stared at the plastic stick, her breath held. The digital window was no longer blank.
It displayed a single word, crisp and final in the sterile light.
PREGNANT.
The word hung in the air between them, solid and unblinking. Catalina’s breath left her in a sharp, audible gasp, as if she’d been punched. She didn’t move. She just stared at the stick on the sink, her knuckles white where she gripped the counter’s edge.
Dominic felt the floor tilt. The single, clinical word was a verdict. It made the abstract threat from downstairs—the potential, the possibility—a concrete, living fact inside her. He took another step into the cramped space, his own reflection ghosting in the mirror behind her, pale and wide-eyed.
A tremor started in Catalina’s hands, a fine vibration that traveled up her arms. Her jaw was clenched so tight he could see the muscle working. She wasn’t crying. She was locking down, hardening against the news like it was a physical blow.
“Look at me,” he said, his voice rough.
She didn’t. Her gaze was fixed on that damning digital display. “Get out,” she whispered, the words brittle.
“No.”
“Get out, Dom!” This time it was a rasp, ragged at the edges. She shoved away from the counter, turning her back to him, her shoulders hunched. “Just go back to the party. Go find someone to fuck. That’s your solution, right?”
Her words were meant to slice, to push him away. They just made him move. He closed the distance in two strides, his hands coming up to grip her upper arms from behind. He felt her flinch beneath his touch, the fresh wounds under her sleeves a silent scream between them.
“Stop,” he said into her ear, his voice low and urgent. “Just stop.”
She went rigid in his grasp. For a second, there was only the sound of her strained breathing and the hum of the fan. Then a wrenching, broken sound tore from her throat. It wasn’t a sob, but a raw, animal noise of pure despair.
The tension in her body shattered. Her knees buckled.
Dominic caught her as she folded, turning her into him, his arms wrapping around her as she sank toward the cold tile floor. He went down with her, holding her weight, cradling her against his chest. Her face pressed into his shoulder, and the first real cry came, a deep, shuddering gasp that dissolved into uncontrollable weeping.
Catalina cried. It was a silent, shuddering convulsion at first, her entire body shaking against him. Then the sound broke free—muffled, desperate sobs that she tried to stifle in the fabric of his shirt. Her fingers clawed into his back, not in passion, but in a frantic search for an anchor.
Dominic held her. He lowered them both to the bathroom floor, his back against the cabinet door, Catalina cradled in his lap. He wrapped his arms around her, one hand cupping the back of her head, his fingers tangling in her dark hair. He held her as tightly as he dared.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured into her hair, the words inadequate. “I’m so sorry, Cat.”
She cried for Mina, for the lie they lived. She cried for the phantom child now taking root, for the future narrowing to a single, impossible path. She cried for the razor and the clean, sharp pain that made sense, unlike this sprawling, emotional wreckage. The sobs wracked through her, leaving her gasping.
He just held on. He didn’t offer solutions or empty promises. He simply absorbed her weight, her heat, the salt of her tears soaking through his shirt to his skin. The party’s bass still thumped dully beneath them, a ludicrous soundtrack to their private collapse.
After a long time, her crying subsided into shaky, hiccuping breaths. She didn’t pull away. She went boneless against him, her earlier fury spent, leaving only a hollowed-out exhaustion. The test stick lay forgotten on the sink edge, its message now a shared, quiet truth.
“I can’t do it again,” she whispered, her voice hoarse and cracked against his collarbone. “I can’t hide another one.”
“We’ll figure it out,” he said. It was the only thing he could say. He ran a hand down her back, feeling the knobs of her spine through her shirt. She felt thinner.
“How?” The word was a plea.
He had no answer. The ‘how’ was a mountain in the dark. He rested his chin on the top of her head, staring at the opposite wall. The nightlight glowed. The fan ticked. He held his sister, the mother of his children, and searched the blank drywall for a plan that didn’t exist.
Finally, he moved. Gently, he shifted, helping her to her feet. She was unsteady, her eyes swollen and distant. He kept an arm around her shoulders, guiding her out of the bathroom, past her bed, and into the hallway.
He didn’t take her to her room. He led her to his.
It was spartan, just a bed, a dresser, the smell of motor oil and clean laundry. He sat her on the edge of the mattress and knelt, pulling her shoes off. She watched him, passive, like a child. He stood and went to the bathroom, returning with a wet washcloth.
He wiped her face, careful around her eyes. The cool cloth brought a slight focus back to her gaze. She looked at him then, really looked at him, her expression raw and open.
“Lie down,” he said softly.
She didn’t argue. She curled onto her side, facing the wall. Dominic toed off his own shoes and lay down behind her, on top of the blankets. He fitted his body against the curve of hers, wrapping an arm around her waist, his hand splayed over her stomach.
He felt her tense for a moment, then release with a long, shuddering sigh. They lay there in the dark, listening to the last of the party die down below. His palm pressed against the place where their new secret, their new crime, was beginning.
Her hand came down and covered his, her fingers lacing through his. Her skin was cool. They didn’t speak. There was nothing left to say that wouldn’t break the fragile stillness. The future was a locked door. For now, in the silent dark, they just held the line.