Page 61 of Ricochet

“I didn’t … pick those out,” he said.

“No, it’s … it’s good.” Gaze glued on the bags of clothes, I offered a half smile. “Thank you … for doing this. I missed simple clothes.”

So badly, I wanted to ask him about the night before—the nightmare and cutting, the names he called out. Thanks to the concealment of his coat sleeve, I caught no more than a glimpse of where thin scars lined his forearm.

“You used to wear this kind of stuff?”

“Yeah, before I became a politician’s wife, and my wardrobe changed to cashmere and linen. And pearls.” I shook my head at the thought. “Twenty four years old, wearing pearls. The only woman in my life who wore pearls was my grandmother.”

Stuffing his hands into the pocket of his jeans, Nick shrugged. “I don’t know, seems fitting for the job of stuffy politician’s wife.”

I toyed with the laces on the Chucks. “It actually wasn’t fitting at all for my job. Not exactly the kind of thing you wear to get down and dirty.”

“What the fuck were you, a mud wrestler?”

Laughter burst from my chest, the sound so strange to me. I hadn’t laughed in a long time, and by the frowned surprise on Nick’s face, it must’ve struck him strange, too. “No. I was a therapist. I only got to go once a week, and it was usually on one of Michael’s off-site meetings. Every Wednesday, I was given precisely three full hours of bliss.”

“What did you do there? Pass out pictures of your husband’s face to young, impressionable future voters?”

I dropped my gaze and my smile faded. “Seems I fooled everyone into thinking I was nothing more than a puppet.” Pulling my knees into my body, I wrapped my arms around them. “Good for me. It’s how you survive that matters most. I like to think some days that perhaps, in those three hours, I did more good than I’d ever done in my whole life.”

“So, what made you get into therapy?” He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the wall.

“Well …” A hiccup of laughter escaped me. “Inside every therapist is a patient.” I shrugged, still toying with the shoestring. “I needed to cope with a few things myself, so I thought helping others would teach me how.”

“That’s why you cut yourself? Trying to cope?”

Why do you cut yourself, I wanted to ask. It’d been a week since he’d seen the scar on my wrist, and I’d have thought he’d forgotten it by then. “You first.”

He shook his head. “No. Tell me. Why did you try to kill yourself?”

“What does it matter?” A couple of days earlier, he’d asked what made mine special. “Does that put a monkey wrench in your plans, or something? Why are you stressing over it? Does that make me damaged goods to whatever bald, fat bastard you’d planned to pawn me off on?”

The twitch in his cheek confessed that he wanted to laugh, but, wisely, he didn’t, and my muscles bunched with the anger rolling through me. “I didn’t say I was stressing.” The flat, no-bullshit tone of his voice clawed at my patience. I wanted to know his secrets, not spill my own. “I said I want to know why you did it.”

No. That was a box I’d been good at keeping locked shut, and I didn’t intend to open it for anyone. Especially not him. As a therapist, vulnerability was something I’d learned to keep to myself. It was one thing to relate to a student, but another to spill a dark box of secrets. That was my box. He could have any other story, any other box inside my head, except for that. “Something else. I don’t want to talk about that one.”

“All right. How ‘bout the one on your back?” Another deeply brutal wound, though one that caused more anger than pain.

“I snuck away to my father’s funeral. Never told Michael.”

His face rumpled to a brief frown. “He scarred you for going to your father’s funeral?”

“No. He scarred me for breaking one of his rules. I failed to tell him where I was going, so he strung me up to a post in the basement and whipped me.” Scooting backward on my butt, I leaned against the wall beside the bed, next to where he’d set the bags of clothes. “He left me down there for three days. The doctor made a house visit to check on my wounds and treat me for dehydration.”

“A doctor visited you and never reported what Culling did to you?”

“To whom, Nick?” I mindlessly rubbed my thumb on the inside of my palm. “He owns the police. The doctor wouldn’t tell a soul, or risk having his tongue severed with a chainsaw. There is nowhere to run. He has all kinds of connections.” Living with Michael was like being trapped by a dictator in a foreign country, surrounded by people who didn’t speak the same language.

“What the fuck made you fall in love with this asshole in the first place? Why’d you marry him?” he asked.

“People marry for different reasons. Mine had nothing to do with love. I’ve lost my faith in romantic love. I don’t believe in it anymore.”

Nick didn’t say anything, just stared at me.

“Now you.”

His gaze fell away from mine, and I expected him to avoid the question, to be a dick and leave me sitting there with my open wound as he walked away. Surprising me, he stroked a hand across his head, over his scar. “I took a bullet to the skull. Spent a year in physical therapy, mental therapy, bullshit therapies. Still have trouble with some words on occasion, and I can’t really do shit with my right hand anymore. Had to learn to shoot a gun with my left.” As if he could anticipate my next question, he shook his head. “’Sall I’m sayin’ about that.”