Autopsy of a Marriage

Chapter 1: The Uninvited Cut

The call came at 3:47 a.m. Nora knew the time because she had been awake, staring at the ceiling, cataloguing the sounds of the house the way she catalogued the contents of a body cavity: the refrigerator's compressor kicking on like a faulty heart, the furnace groaning through the ducts like a dying lung, the creak of the second-floor joists as the temperature dropped and the wood contracted.

She had not been waiting for a call. That was the thing she would tell herself later, and the thing she would half-believe. She had simply been awake, as she often was, because Daniel slept beside her with his hand curled against his chest like a sleeping child, and she liked to watch the rise and fall of his ribs in the dark. It was a private thing, a vigil of sorts. He never knew she did it. He never knew she counted his breaths the way she counted the beats of a heart on a monitor, waiting for the flatline that never came.

But it had come. Just not on a monitor.

Her phone vibrated against the nightstand—a low, angry buzz that cut through the silence like a saw blade through sternum. She reached for it without looking, her fingers finding the familiar weight of the device, and she saw the screen light up with the name of the on-call resident at the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office.

Marcus Webb. She had trained him. He was