Page 53 of No Good Fight

“My apartment used to be the first place that was mine,” she says after several minutes.

I turn down the heat because the cab has grown warm, but I don’t answer. Not yet. She isn’t asking me to fix anything.

“When I moved in, I bought dishes I liked,” she continues, her voice careful around the edges. “Nothing matched. He would have hated that. Matching things mattered to him. Towels. Glasses. My clothes. My mood. Instead, I bought one of everything in different styles just because I could. And I loved it. Until that stupid break-in.”

My hand tightens on the steering wheel.

She notices.

“You’re doing the jaw thing,” she says. “And the hand thing.”

“I’m trying not to.” Every breath I take, I try to relax, but I just can’t.

“That’s not reassuring.” Her voice is almost comically flat.

“I know.”

She pulls one knee onto the seat and turns slightly toward me. My jacket slips down one shoulder, and I have to look back at the water before I do something stupid like fix it for her just to feel the fabric under my hand.

“It wasn’t awful at first,” she says. “That’s the part I hate saying. People want the monster to show up on day one wearing a name tag and holding a weapon, but he didn’t. Preston was charming. He remembered details that I didn’t think anyone did. He brought coffee to my classes when I was tired, made exactly the way I liked it. He met Josh and shook his hand and acted like he respected him. He made me feel chosen.”

I look at her reflection in the side window. Her mouth twists in a way that makes me want to put my fist through something hard enough to hurt myself.

“Then he started making comments,” she says. “Small ones. My skirt was too short. My laugh was too loud. My friends were jealous. My deadlines were making me selfish. If I got upset, he’d say he was only trying to help me be better. I believed him for longer than I want to admit.”

“That’s what men like him do.”

Her eyes come to mine. “You sound like you know.”

“I’ve seen a lot of shit at work, Alex.” The domestic call sits behind my ribs again. So did every time Alex smile with dead eyes while the rest of us called her busy. But I’m not about to bring that shit up.

She looks back at the water. “Eventually, I stopped going places without telling him. Not because he told me to…at first. I just got tired of the fight that came after I made my own decisions. Then my phone became his phone when he took it and gave me a new one on his plan. My passwords became his passwords, things he had to be able to control and check. If I changed them, he found out. If I got quiet, he said I was punishing him by giving him the silent treatment. If I talked too much, I was embarrassing him. Every version of me was wrong unless he was the one who made it.”

My throat burns with everything I can’t say.

Alex gives a humorless little laugh. “The worst part is how boring it sounds when I say it out loud. Like a checklist from a terrible brochure. Isolation. Criticism. Control. Escalation. Congratulations, you have completed your abusive relationship punch card. Now, you either escape, or you die.”

“Alex.”

“I know.” She wipes under one eye with the heel of her hand, annoyed by the tear more than upset by it. “Bad joke.”

“No.” I turn in my seat enough to face her. “I was going to say none of that sounds boring.”

Her face crumples for half a second before she drags it back together. That almost breaks my self-control clean in half.

“I hated him before you knew I did,” I admit.

Her attention sharpens. “What?”

“I hated him before the breakup. Before the bruises I saw too late to do anything about. Before I knew enough to call it what it was and beat the shit out of him.” I look out at the water because telling the truth to the windshield is easier than telling it to her face. “I hated the way you changed around him. How you’d check your phone and lose your smile in the middle of a family party. How you stopped wearing that red sweater you used to love because he made some comment at a cookout and you laughed it off like it didn’t matter. How you stopped staying late at Josh’s because he’d text until you left.”

Alex is silent as I give her just enough of my truth to make us both uncomfortable, but to leave the truth to breathe.

I force myself to keep going. She deserves the ugly parts too.

“I told myself it wasn’t my place. You were happy. Josh didn’t say anything. You didn’t say anything. Then every time I saw you, there was a little less of you in the room, and I kept standing there with my hands in my pockets like that made me respectful instead of useless.”

“You weren’t useless,” she whispers.