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Especially that I love him.
I can only pray he’ll still be willing to listen.
One of the prison guards stops by the room to inform me that it’s time for me to leave. Reluctantly, I kiss my mother’s forehead and head out, collecting my belongings at the desk. My phone light is blinking with several missed calls. Nick’s number, I see as I quickly scroll through the log. He didn’t leave any messages. And his last attempt to call me was several hours ago.
He’s given up on me. Of course, he has. I’ve all but ensured he would, haven’t I?
I rub my sternum as the ache that took up residence there earlier now feels like an icy abyss.
It’s raining when I exit the infirmary building. I hardly even notice the cold, wet drops as I walk out to the visitor lot. My rental is near the back and I walk to it feeling adrift, uncertain where I’m going or where I belong anymore.
As I reach the white compact car, my gaze snags on the vehicle parked in the space beside it. The sleek black BMW’s engine is running, thin gray exhaust steaming in the drizzle.
My feet stop moving. At the same time, Nick emerges from the driver’s side.
At first, I can’t find my voice. Torn between elation and dread, I can only stare at this beautiful man who means everything to me, shocked to see him. Horrified that he’s come here, to the very place I never wanted him to see.
“I had to know if you were okay,” he says. “When you wouldn’t answer my calls, I had your GPS tracked. And it led me here.” I can’t read his expression. Standing with me in the rain, he looks as uncertain and wary as I know I must to him.
“Nick.” The impulse to run to him—to bury myself in his arms—is nearly overwhelming. But I don’t know if he’ll reject me. I wouldn’t blame him if he did. I stand frozen in place, unsure what to say to him now that he’s standing in front of me. “I wanted to call you. I would have. I planned to . . .”
He doesn’t seem interested in my excuses now. He gestures at the women’s prison behind me. “So, I’m guessing this is where your mother’s been since you were sixteen.”
Not a question he needs me to confirm, but I nod. “Nick, I don’t want to do this here—”
“We didn’t have to, Avery. You could’ve told me long before it came to this.”
He’s right, and I won’t even try to argue. I start to shiver, though it’s not the rain that’s making me so miserable.
“Get in out of the cold,” Nick says, his tone level, devoid of emotion. “We’ll talk in the car.”
Woodenly, I open the passenger side and climb in. He slides into the driver’s seat, the soft thump of his door making me flinch. For a long while, there is only silence in the car.
Finally, the words just start tumbling out of me. And once they start, I can’t stop them.
“My daddy, Daniel Ross, died when I was very young. He was a good man, and we were happy—me, my mom and him. When I was seven years old, he had a massive heart attack. He was gone, just like that. And everything changed. My mom eventually met someone else—a man named Martin Coyle. He worked at a school the next town over. He seemed nice. He was nice, but then he married my mom and things started to change. He would say mean things to her sometimes—then, once, he hit her. He promised he never would again, but that promise didn’t last. None of his promises or apologies were worth a damn. And then, after I started getting a little older, he began looking at me in ways that made me uncomfortable. He started trying touching me when my mom wasn’t there. I learned to avoid him, to leave the house if I knew he was home alone. Finally, when I was sixteen, he did more than touch me. And, that time, I wasn’t able to stop him.”
Memories of that day crash down on me as I speak. All my life, I’ve shut them out, banished them to a dark corner of my mind if only so I could survive. So as not to let them own me. But, now, I let them flood in. The dam is breaking and I need Nick to understand.
“I couldn’t get away that day. He . . . he raped me.”
Nick stares at me. “And then your mother killed him.”
“Yes. She shot him.” I swallow the regret—and the guilt—that’s lodged in my throat. “She killed him to protect me.”
Although it’s my personal horror, Nick looks stricken by what he’s heard. “I didn’t know, Avery. I’m sorry.” He slowly shakes his head, and when he speaks, his voice is softer than I’ve ever heard it. “I told you that you could trust me. I told you that the only way this would work—the only way we could work—was without barriers or inhibitions. But if I’d known about this—”
“That’s right,” I say softly. “If you’d known about this, you would’ve looked at me differently. You would’ve been different with me. Or worse, you would’ve stayed away.”
He doesn’t deny it, and strangely, that gives me strength.
“There’s more I haven’t told you, Nick. I’ve been lying to you about a lot of things these past three and a half months.”
I tell him how Claire Prentice isn’t a friend of mine at all, that she hired me to housesit. I tell him how my ‘public relations’ job was actually bartending with Tasha at Vendange, and how I’d been two weeks away from being homeless because my apartment had been sold out from under me and I couldn’t afford to move somewhere else.
He listens, stoic, silent. Giving me no indication whether he forgives me or de
spises me.
