“Amy, I only have a few minutes before my next call. What is this big emergency?” Melissa said as she closed my backyard fence’s gate behind her.

I shook my head in reply and adjusted my leg, which was propped up on the patio chair next to me. An ice pack covered my ankle, and I winced as it moved against my skin. I swore the wound had its own heartbeat.

Melissa stopped abruptly, hands on her hips, when she saw my face. She squinted down at me and pointed to my leg. “Wow. That looks terrible. What happened to you?”

I gestured for her to sit down and took a long sip of water as she settled in. The kids were playing inside, and I could see they were still on the couch through the sliding glass door. The night before, after I had regained the ability to speak, I had told Mark the whole story as I tried to drink a glass of wine in the kitchen, my hands shaking violently.

“I’m going to call Tim,” he had said as he reached for his phone. “Liz is obviously having some kind of breakdown.”

I snatched the phone out of his hand so quickly that I scratched his fingers. “No. I don’t think he’s even noticed—or even cares. It might make things worse. I think we should think through this first, come up with a plan, and then loop him in.”

When he tried to reach for his phone, I held it away and added, “Please. Just let me talk to Jess and Melissa first, and then we can approach him.” He folded his arms across his chest, leaning back in the chair at the kitchen island.

“Okay. So what do you want to do?” He craned his neck around and looked at my leg, wincing. “Should we go to urgent care?”

I gingerly lifted the bag of frozen peas off my leg and then quickly put it back on when I saw it was beginning to blister. “It’s too late. I don’t want to wake the kids. Let me see how it is in the morning before we do anything.” Exhaustion overtook my body, and my spine felt like it had turned to dust. I slumped forward. “I just want to get some sleep.”

Except, sleep never came. My leg throbbed and burned all night, and every time I closed my eyes, all I saw was Liz’s black pupils, two dark holes in her head. I thought about texting her, asking her if she even remembered what had happened or if she’d had some kind of out-of-body experience, but I wanted to talk to our friends first.

When I woke up from my fitful dreams and gathered enough courage to see my leg, I saw that the wound had turned so purple it looked black, dotted with fresh scabs and angry red streaks.