She looks up at me, and the fear in her eyes is crushing. “I’m clean. I have been for years. Since I found out I was pregnant. But... I was an addict. And he used that. He held it over my head. If I didn’t do what he wanted, he’d cut me off. Make me sick.”
“Son of a bitch,” Fallon growls, the sound vibrating in his chest. “He starved you to control you.”
“It gets worse,” she says. She picks up the first index card. “I didn’t want to play these. But I wanted you to hear his voice. So you understand.”
She presses play on her phone.
A man’s voice fills the room. “You ungrateful little bitch. You think you can just leave? You think you can take our daughter and hide?”
It’s Luke. The tone is lazy, condescending, but the threat underneath is distinct.
“You’re nothing without me. You’re a junkie whore. Nobody else will ever want you.”
I feel my fists clench so hard my nails dig into my palms. Eli leans forward, his jaw set so hard I can hear his teeth grinding.
She stops the recording. The silence in the warehouse is deafening.
“He sent those,” she whispers, “for weeks. Random numbers at first, then this one today.”
“Where is he?” I ask, my voice sounding like I’ve been swallowing glass.
“The police have him,” she says. “Or they had him. He skipped bail. They were tracking him down for a violation, but he vanished. They’re building a case.”
“Why come back now?” Eli asks, voicing the frustration that has been eating at me all night. “Why today?”
“Luke isn’t Maisie’s father,” she says. “And he hates me for it.”
We all freeze.
“What?” Fallon asks.
“Tabarnak,” I swear under my breath, the French curse exploding from me before I can stop it. “He hates you because of that?”
“He hates that I had a baby and couldn’t have a baby for him,” she says, her voice hollow. “Before I came to Fox Hollow, I was pregnant. I thought we were finally having the life we had both been dreaming about. But I guess I was wrong.”
I have a feeling I will despise the answer, but I ask anyway. “What happened to the baby?”
“Luke got drunk one day and beat me,” she says, the words flat, devoid of emotion to protect herself from the pain. “He beat me until I lost the baby.”
A tear tracks down her cheek. She doesn’t wipe it away. “I was in the hospital for days. A broken wrist. Broken ribs. Concussion. And he sat there, and held my hand, and told me he was sorry. That the baby was better off. That we could try again.”
“I want to kill him,” Eli says, his voice low and trembling with rage.
“No,” she says quickly. “Listen. There’s more. The day I met Eli? That very first time I met him in the grocery store?”
“Yeah,” Eli says.
“Luke called me,” she says. “He told me he was happy. He told me he was moving on. That he had gotten someone else pregnant. A son. He said... he said I was the problem. That I was broken. That he was finally going to be a father.”
“Scum,” Fallon spits.
“I didn’t know who she was,” Amber continues. “I never met her. I didn’t care. I just wanted him gone. But the police... they showed me a picture today.”
She slides a printed photo across the rug. We all lean in to look.
It’s a woman. Dark hair. Pale skin. The resemblance to Amber is unsettling. Same jawline. Same eyes.
“She looks like you,” Eli says, his brow furrowed.
