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“I had an argument with her,” Cavan said. “That last day. Devon wasn’t there. Patrick had done something, I don’t remember what, and I got pissed off and lost it. I told her she needed to kick him out, and if he wouldn’t go, she needed to pack her bags and get the hell out. Whatever got her away from him for good. I told her it would only get worse, that someday he’d hurt her. I told her to save herself. I even told her that if she wouldn’t do it, I’d pack her bags for her and haul her out of there. I’d shove her in the fucking car and start driving.” His voice cracked again. “That’s what I said.”
“Cavan,” I said, my voice laced with pain.
“She said no,” he said. “She said she’d try and kick him out, but she wasn’t leaving. She said that she knew him, she knew how to handle him, that she could make things work. She had all the excuses—he just needed time, and caring, and if he could just get a job. The whole script. I knew all of it was a lie, but you know what I did? I backed off. I accepted it. I told her she was crazy, but I didn’t push. I walked out. My last words to her were, ‘Don’t blame me when you end up in the hospital.’ Can you fucking believe that, Dani? I was an eighteen-year-old selfish asshole. That’s what I fucking said.”
“It isn’t your fault,” I said.
“No? She was dead four hours later. He must have come home, and she must have tried to kick him out. He strangled her, then stabbed her with a pair of scissors.” He took a breath. “If I’d just done it, Dani. If I’d just thrown her over my shoulder and put her in the car and hit the gas, it wouldn’t have happened. I fucking knew, and I didn’t push hard enough. I didn’t fight hard enough. I didn’t do enough. That’s on me—it will always be on me. I couldn’t look Devon in the eye anymore; I couldn’t be around him. So I did yet another heroic act—I bailed on him. I walked away and left my sixteen-year-old brother alone, because I couldn’t stand to look at him. That’s the great fucking guy you married, Dani. That’s the deal you made.”
“You were eighteen,” I said. God, I had done so many stupid things at eighteen. Tried stupid drugs, taken stupid dares, let stupid boys put their hands down my pants. “You were eighteen, and you had no parents, no guardian, no help. Your mother was murdered. How were you supposed to know what to do? It was over ten years ago, Cavan. You’re not an eighteen-year-old boy anymore.”
“I ditched everything,” Cavan said. “I gave up. I hitchhiked for a while, and I ended up in a tattoo shop, and the guy there let me learn. And then one day, one of the Black Dogs walked in. The rest was history. I was no one for ten years. I was nobody. I had no life, no ambition, no purpose. And then you walked in and asked me to save you. And I looked at you, and I looked at McMurphy, and I could see the fucking future. I could see it like a fucking map.”
I remembered it with perfect detail, that moment when I’d sat in his chair. Cavan’s careful expression, the way he’d looked at McMurphy. The way he’d looked at me.
Always, the way he’d looked at me. Seeing everything. Seeing me.
“It turned out I had one purpose in life,” Cavan said. “Exactly one. I was born to do one thing, and that was get you the fuck away from him. So that’s what I did. It’s what I’m still doing, Dani, and I’m not going to leave the job undone this time.”
I closed my eyes. The tears were easing, though the hurt wasn’t. “I love you so much,” I said.
“That wasn’t part of the plan,” my husband said. “I was just supposed to put you in the car and hit the gas, like I should have done when I was eighteen. Just go. But I love you more than anything, do you understand? More than fucking anything. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for you. You need to be safe, I’ll make you safe. You need to erase him, I’ll try my fucking best. I can’t stop it, Dani. I never could.”
He loved me. He loved me. Then why did this hurt so much? “Please don’t get hurt,” I told him. “I’m your wife. I want to be married to you for more than one night.”
“You’re insane,” he said. “I have to go.”
When we hung up I still sat there for a long minute. I was still naked, and I was shaking. My thoughts were wild, scrambling.
I could go after him—there was that. I had a car, the keys, money. He was right, he wasn’t the boss of me. That meant I could go to Arizona, just like he could.
But suddenly, I had a better idea.
There were two of us in this marriage. And despite its less than stellar beginning—and the fact that my husband had just left me—it was a marriage. Or it would be. Cavan had no idea how determined I could be.
Maybe I needed saving, but so did he.
And I knew exactly how to do it.
Twenty-Three
Cavan
Pesos, Arizona, didn’t have much in it, but it was not far off the interstate and it had a bar. I called McMurphy and set up a meeting, and then I sat in a dark booth next to the window to the parking lot and ordered a beer and a sandwich. Someday, I thought while I watched the cars and trucks pull in and out, I’d be done with hotels and diners. Today was not that day.
It turns out a guilty conscience can keep you untethered for a long time.
It wouldn’t take McMurphy long to get here, I figured. I didn’t know where he was when I called him, but he’d been on the road, not back at the club house. On his way to Vegas, maybe, to kill me—I didn’t know, and I didn’t care. I just wanted this over with, for me and Dani both.
It was time to stop running. So I told McMurphy where I was, and I settled in to wait.
It hadn’t been easy to tell her what I did, but I felt better now. I’d held it in for ten years, never telling anyone, thinking about it only when I lay awake in the early hours of the morning, unable to stop the memories from coming. Maybe it was true that confession was good for the soul. It didn’t take away what had happened, but maybe now that Dani knew the truth I’d lie awake a little less.
But I’d lie awake alone, just like I always had.
What would she do? I didn’t know; I couldn’t predict. Follow me, or curse me, or divorce me, or forget about me—it could be any one of those things. I’d rolled the dice, and the only thing to do was see where they landed. You can’t do much with dice once they’re in the air.
I ate my sandwich, and I drank my beer. Then another, nursing them slowly. The sky turned to dusk, the purple unbearably beautiful over the desert. I was watching a man and a woman smoke cigarettes in the parking lot—he was obviously trying to charm her, and it wasn’t working—when someone slid into the booth across from me. I turned, and stopped breathing.
