Part 3
Hannah dropped to her knees beside the culvert and pressed one cheek near the opening.
“Winnie?”
Another cry came from several feet inside, weaker now. Rainwater moved through the pipe in a shallow brown ribbon, carrying leaves and grit toward the lake. Hannah could make out two pale eyes beyond a tangle of branches washed against the far end.
She crawled in.
The concrete scraped her palms and shoulders. Cold water soaked through her clothes, but she kept going until she reached the branches. Winnie had wedged herself behind them, body flattened, one back paw caught beneath a forked stick.
“It’s me,” Hannah whispered. “I’m not going to pull you until you’re free.”
She broke the smaller branches one by one. Winnie hissed when Hannah lifted the last stick, then scrambled into her chest so suddenly that Hannah struck her head against the pipe. She held on anyway, one arm around the cat and the other dragging them backward through the muddy water.
Derek stood at the gate when they emerged. He had put on jeans and a jacket, but he had not come down into the ditch.
“You look insane,” he said.
Hannah rose with Winnie pressed beneath her chin. Mud ran from her sleeves. “You almost hit her.”
“I threw a shoe at the fence.”
“You knew she was there.”
“Oh, come on.” Derek glanced toward the cabin as if embarrassed for the trees to hear them. “You crawled into a drainage pipe for a cat that would’ve walked out in ten minutes.”
Hannah felt Winnie’s heart hammering against her ribs. Her own anger arrived quietly, without heat. “Don’t speak to me like that again.”
Derek blinked.
It was not a dramatic sentence. It did not undo eleven years. But Hannah had never said it before, and both of them knew it. She carried Winnie into the cabin and locked the mudroom door behind them. Derek left before lunch, taking his leather house shoe with him and slamming the front door hard enough to rattle the windows. For the next two weeks, he did not return.
Hannah cleaned the cuts on Winnie’s paw and slept with the cat beside her. She also called a family-law attorney in Milwaukee from the dock, where the lake wind covered her voice. The attorney did not tell her what to do. She explained accounts, property, documents, and the difference between preparing to leave and being ready to leave. Hannah wrote everything down in a yellow notebook and hid it inside an old flour tin above the refrigerator.
She began noticing other things too. Twice, her left hand went numb for several minutes. Once, a bright shimmer crossed her vision while she was reading. She blamed stress, bad sleep, too much coffee. When a nurse at her doctor’s office suggested urgent evaluation, Hannah promised she would go if it happened again.
It happened again on a Wednesday in early September.
Derek arrived just after noon without warning, bringing a real-estate appraiser and the brisk, false cheer he used around strangers. Hannah watched from the porch as the two men walked the shoreline and discussed roof age, septic access, and comparable properties.
When the appraiser left, she met Derek in the kitchen. “Why was he here?”
“We need options.”
“This cabin was my aunt’s.”
“And then it became ours.” Derek opened the refrigerator and frowned at its contents. “You’re living in one property while the condo sits half-empty, and you’ve been talking about numbness for weeks. If something is wrong, we need options.”
“Selling this place isn’t a medical plan.”
“Neither is hiding up here and ignoring it.”
She had told him once about the numbness. He had said she needed less screen time.
“I’m not selling Pineglass,” she said.
“You don’t get to decide that alone.”
Neither of them heard Winnie enter the kitchen. She moved behind Hannah’s legs and sat near the pantry, watching Derek’s hands.
Hannah reached for a glass of water. The tumbler slipped through her fingers and struck the floor without breaking.
Derek looked down. “Seriously?”
She tried to answer, but her tongue would not shape the word. The left side of the room tilted. Her knee folded beneath her, and the counter rushed upward at the wrong angle.
Winnie yowled.
The sound changed Derek’s face. He caught Hannah before her head hit the tile and shouted her name, then grabbed his phone. By the time the dispatcher answered, Hannah could no longer move her left arm.
The next minutes came apart into pieces: Derek unlocking the front door, paramedics kneeling beside her, scissors cutting through the sleeve of her blouse, a blood-pressure cuff tightening until her fingers tingled. Winnie circled just beyond their knees, crying each time someone touched Hannah.
“Can you secure the cat?” one paramedic asked.
Derek looked toward the carrier in the mudroom, then at the stretcher being unfolded. “She’ll stay out of the way.”
He did not secure her.
When the paramedics carried Hannah through the porch door, Winnie followed. She slipped between boots and ran beside the stretcher down the walk, her body low, her calls sharp and repetitive.
Hannah’s eyes moved toward the sound. Her right hand lifted from the blanket, fingers opening as if searching through the air.
Winnie reached the stretcher just before it rose into the ambulance. She stood on her hind legs and touched her nose to Hannah’s fingertips.
Then Derek pulled her away with his shoe.
“Move,” he snapped, already turning toward his SUV.
The ambulance doors closed on Hannah’s open hand. Red lights swept over the yard, the porch, and Winnie’s gray coat. She ran after the vehicle until the gate stopped her, then watched it disappear between the pines. Derek’s SUV followed less than a minute later, and neither vehicle came back that night…
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