Page 34 of No Good Fight

It’s me and him.

Fucking Preston Lee.

The man who destroyed every sense of self and individuality that I had. The one who tortured me. Hurt me. For years.

I’m about to throw up.

His arm is around my waist, his mouth near my temple, my smile wide enough to look happy if someone doesn’t know what they’re seeing. I know exactly what happened ten minutes before the picture. I laughed at something one of his friends said, and his hand closed around my hip beneath the table hard enough to make me stop.

Then he told me not to embarrass him and that he was already going to make me pay as soon as we got home.

Then someone pointed a camera at us.

And I smiled like the good little woman he demanded I be.

I kept that goddamn smile on my face for hours. Until we were home and he took a belt to my skin like I deserved his anger and the pain.

The memory hits with enough force that the parking lot blurs.

I turn the picture over.

You looked happier with me.

The handwriting is neat and too familiar to dismiss everything else as coincidence.

My lungs stop doing their job properly.

“No,” I whisper and let the word disappear into the rain, useless and small.

That denial is all I can manage through the rising panic.

I tore this picture up. I remember the sound of it after I shattered the frame that been holding it in the living room. I remember shoving the pieces under coffee grounds in the trash because even then, some part of me was afraid he might find a way to put me back together wrong.

The photo smells like cigarette smoke and his overly expensive cologne.

Maybe that’s impossible.

Maybe my brain is filling in the horror of my memories for free.

Headlights sweep into the lot.

I jerk back and hit my shoulder against the open car door.

For one terrible second, I see nothing but the glare of the lights. My hand crushes the photograph, and every parked car around me becomes a place someone could hide. My pulse jumps so hard it hurts behind my eyes.

Then the truck turns and I see the driver.

Ryder.

Relief hits before I can stop it, warm and humiliating and so strong my knees almost forget to hold me on my feet.

He parks crookedly two spaces away and gets out before the engine fully settles. Rain darkens his shirt in seconds. He moves toward me fast, then slows, like he remembers halfway across the lot that charging at a panicked woman might not improve the situation.

“Alex.”

I try to answer him. Try to give him anything other than the extreme fear coursing through my veins.

Nothing happens.