I tossed my arms around her before it could. She did the same.
There, standing just past the threshold of the rear door in the hallway that connected my bedroom and kitchen, we held one another as tightly as our bodies would allow. I don’t know who started crying first, but one of us did, and the other joined in, and it took holding my breath to make it stop.
The sorrow was like a vacuum in the center of my chest, ripping me into it and shredding all the scars that had healed over the last year.
We’d run like our lives depended on it, because they had. Simone had left David, and I’d left Troy, because even if we’d managed to survive their violence, we were dead in their company. They had taken our sense of self, sense of confidence, even our sanity. They had taken it all, and Rhiannon’s Ranch had given it back.
Last night, we were faced with the harsh reality that all this could be gone in an instant. Each of us here were dominoes. If one of us fell, we all could.
When I killed David, I thought that I caught Simone in her rapid descent. In a way, I had. And yet, the two of us were weeping in one another’s arms, toppling to the ground, comforting each other in crumpled balls on the floor, yet again, through the chaos of a man’s violence.
It tookus a while to get up off the floor. Not long after, with a couple cups of coffee in hand, we settled in on the sofa. Honey jumped up between us and cuddled against my thigh. Stroking my fingers through her fur served as the tether to reality I had lost in Great Falls.
We sat in silence for a while. I looked around the room for some signs of what had happened last night. There were none. Any of Simone’s blood that had spilled on the floor, she’d cleaned up. I’d left my bloody boots on the floor by the door last night, dripping with crimson and melting snow. Now, they rested on the kitchen table, sparkling as if they were brand new.
I wasn’t sure what Simone remembered, but she’d known enough to clean the blood off my boots.
I looked at my friend, her face still swollen, and broke the silence. “How did he find you?”
Tucking herself deeper into the corner of the sofa, Simone eased out a breath. “I’m an idiot. That’s how.”
“You did open the gate for him,” I said, “so I’m not going to disagree with you there.”
She shot me the bird.
“Junie,” Simone said. “Junie got sick at school the day before yesterday. Her fever was 103. I was in the middle of an appointment with a client who had hair down to her ass and wanted to go platinum.” In other words, a very long appointment. “I missed the school’s call. She didn’t even seem sick when I’d dropped her off that morning. But they asked Junie if there was another number they could reach me at, and I guess she remembered David’s. She must’ve given it to them.
“When I called the school back an hour later, they told me to come pick her up. I did. And the nurse said something about how she talked to Junie’s dad on the phone.” She shut her eyes, her breath shaking. “She said he would’ve come to get her, buthe wasn’t on the list of people who could. She must’ve told him where I worked, because yesterday, he was outside the salon.”
Simone reached up to rub her eyes, wincing when she touched the black and blue one. “We argued outside. It was messy, and stupid, and embarrassing. But some bystanders saw it going down and threatened to call the cops on him. He hauled ass. I figured that would be enough to scare him off. Last time I googled him, he had a mile long list of warrants. And it’s not like he knew where I lived.
“He must’ve called the salon and asked to set up an appointment or something to get my number, because he started blowing up my phone. Literally, every five minutes from 5 o’clock on he was calling me.
“Finally, I answered at 11:30. I was going to tell him to go to hell, but he said he was at the gate. Must’ve followed me home.” She gritted her teeth and shook her head. “I thought I could go talk to him. Just get him to leave, you know? At least until I figured out how to tell Rhiannon about it. But there’s no talking to guys like him. He started saying that I was keeping his kid from him, and he was gonna send me to jail for violating the court order, which I don’t even think they would do. But maybe they would. I guess, technically, when I brought Junie here, that was kidnapping. Either way though.” With shaking fingers, she rubbed her forehead. “We were fighting, and then you were there.”
“If he followed you, wouldn’t he have caught up to you on the road?” I stroked my fingers through Honey’s fur, hoping it would ease the tremble in them that hadn’t stopped all night. “I mean, when you come up the driveway to the ranch, you’re pretty much on top of whoever is nearby.”
“I don’t know how else he would’ve found it,” she said.
“What about an AirTag or something? Did he see you get out of your car at work? Could he have planted a tracker under it?”
Simone shook her head. “He’s a paranoid drug dealer, Gwen. All he uses are burner phones. You have to connect accounts to credit cards and shit for trackers and air tags. He followed me here. I guarantee it.”
Chewing my lip, I nodded. His car had been too old to have any type of navigation built into it. It wasn’t traceable. If he only used burner phones, if I’d missed one inside the car, that was untraceable, too.
“But everything after that,” Simone said, voice barely above a whisper, “after you showed up, it’s all a blur.”
I nodded. If she didn’t remember anything after the violence, if this ever got back to the police, she could say she hadn’t seen anything. This way, she had plausible deniability.
“That’s it?” she asked. “You’re not gonna say anything?”
I met her gaze.
“Like, I don’t know, explain the blood on your shoes?” Simone asked. “Or how the hell I got back here?”
“What do you want me to say, Simone?”
“Telling me what the hell happened would be a good start,” she said. “Discussing what story we’re gonna tell everybody might be a good idea. Figuring out how I’m gonna hide these bruises from Rhiannon would be nice, too.”
