When he opens the door to the basement, panic rises in my throat, my chest tightens, and my hands shake, but I won’t claw at him and make him carry me down. Not this time. I need him to feel like I learned my lesson and will acquiesce to him. He makes me walk past him to go down the stairs. I take slow and careful steps as I obey his silent command. I lean against the drywall with my left shoulder and take the second step carefully, unsure of what he’ll do, because I’ve never not fought the basement room before. And then, when I make it to the fourth stair down, I feel the blunt force of his heel between my shoulder blades and the searing burn as my breath leaves my lungs. I don’t tumble, grasping the railing or searching for my bearings, I fly and land on the concrete floor with a crack that sounds like breaking bones.
He doesn’t bother locking me in the cement room. He just clicks the dead bolt on the basement door above me and leaves me there. I lie still for some time in the semidarkness. There’s still a square of weak light from the egress window, and I try to look down at my body before the light goes completely. I move my wrists and then I try to sit up, feeling sharp stabs of pain. When I take in a breath, it pierces my back. I broke a rib, at least one. That’s okay; there is no real medical care needed for broken ribs. No crutches, no boot, no cast, just time. I get myself to my knees, and I know there will be severe bruising on the side of my face and hip where I landed, but only my right ribs seem broken.
I crawl over to a pile of dirty linens in a laundry basket, careful to take only shallow breaths. I pull them out and onto the floor so I can lie down on them. Was that the last opportunity I’ll ever have to escape? He let me swing Avery at the small park behind the house a couple times a week while he watched from the window. Now that’s gone—the last modicum of freedom.
The dirty mop and bleach smell coupled with the crippling pain make me crawl to the utility sink to throw up, only I can’t stand, so I vomit on the cement floor near the metal drain. I think back to the last time I was sure I’d found a way out. It was after I knew he’d trapped me, but when he was still taking me out in public now and then for show, and with rules. No using the restroom. If I had to, we would leave the event, and he’d be infuriated, so I didn’t drink water or anything else the whole day to ensure I didn’t have to go. No leaving his side, no discussing my past, no sulking orantisocial bullshit. This phase only lasted a few weeks because I tried getting into someone else’s Uber when he was saying his goodbyes outside a restaurant. No matter how many times I screamed at the driver to go, the guy took his time putting directions into his phone, and then it was too late: Lucas had jumped in beside me.
That’s also the night I found three hundred dollars and thought it would equal freedom. In the restaurant lounge, his work was having a little cocktail party, and I was within a few feet of him all night. At one point, he got cornered in a conversation. I saw his eyes dart around for me a few times, but these were important figures in his world, and he couldn’t be rude, so I slipped out of his sight and into the coat check. I dug in every pocket and handbag for cash until I came up with just over three hundred dollars. I pushed it down into my underwear and returned to the party, figuring I’d pay later, but I never did because I materialized in a group of women who were chatting near him. I inserted myself into the conversation, and after a few minutes, Lucas came over, and one of the women affectionately grabbed my arm and said, “Sorry to steal her away from you, lovebird.”
This made it appear that I had been cornered by the woman and had no choice but to be polite like he’d told me to be. Mercifully, the punishment didn’t happen. And I thought that money was definitely a way out, that he didn’t know. I paid a guy in the neighborhood the whole amount to get me a fake passport. This was before Lucas locked me in at night. He was still pretending I had some autonomy, but there were cameras and alarms, so it was, of course, part of the game. I learned the code to the alarm and cameras over time by watching him. It took weeks before I could piece together the six-digit code, and when I did, I went to the park behind the house and gave this guy all of my money. I knew the guy from the first few months we moved here, before I realized what was happening, so I trusted him. Sort of. But it was a shot I had to take.
I wish now that I had just run. It was before Avery, so maybe I could have. Even though he said he had every resource to find me and he promised he would and then he’d kill me. But I wanted to go home, and I needed that ID. I never got it, and the guy used my money on drugs. He actually told me so. To make things worse, the coat-check man got fired for stealing, Lucas mentioned days later.
Now, lying here, unable to hold my baby, a year into this hell that has become my life, I feel like letting go. I sometimes think it would be better if I just took all the citalopram in one swallow and floated away from here in a painless, weightless sleep from which I’d never wake up.
But Avery.
Then I remember the gold watch I stole. I put it down the side of my shoe with the ID, just in case. I close my eyes and let the tears stream down and fall on my neck, the labor of the crying immediately causing severe pain in my ribs. I wince, but I focus all my thoughts on the watch that he doesn’t know about and how I will sell it. I took the woman’s ID. I learned the hard way that you need an ID to pawn or sell, and now I have one. She’s a few years older, a few pounds heavier, but she’s a brunette of average height, and it could work. It’s another chance. I have to try again.
13
PAIGE
Paige wakes up earlier than usual. She takes a mug of coffee and goes out front in her robe to water her marigolds and let Christopher eat the dandelions in the garden against the house. She hears a baby crying incessantly and sees Lucas and Georgia’s baby sitting in a pink mesh playpen on the porch. Usually she’d scream at any careless parents to shut their kid up the way she did at an Applebee’s a few months back, as she took crayons and coloring menus away from two toddlers and shoved them in her purse, to their parents’ horror. Maybe not coincidentally, that was the last time Grant tried to force her out to a restaurant.
This time, she remembers meeting little Avery and she feels something—a tightening around her heart, an ache that makes her want to run over and pick the child up—but the mother is skittish and makes Paige uneasy, so she doesn’t follow her instinct. She can’t quite understand why she wants to protect this baby, but she shakes it off when she sees Lucas come out onto the porch.
It’s not just Lucas. She sees him slam open the screen door and hold it, impatiently, a scowl on his face, as the wife walks out very slowly. It looks like she’s limping. Or something doesn’t look right, anyway. She looks either really hungover or...maybe she’s sick and they’re hiding it, and that’s why they’re so odd. He gestures impatiently, angrily toward the baby, and Georgia goes to the child immediately and kisses her several times. He sees Paige watching them and waves. She doesn’t wave back. Everyone is a suspect, and that weird son of a bitch isn’t getting a wave from her. When he goes inside, she notices Christopher making circles, so she instructs him to poop on the Kinneys’ side lawn.
“Go right there, bubs. See? Over there. Good!” she says in the high-pitched voice she uses when she talks to him, and he obeys.
She lies on the couch and watchesDr. PhilandHouse Huntersuntil noon. She remembers what seems like such a short time ago, when Caleb sat in the recliner to her right whileDr. Philwas on. He asked how she watched this crap. There was a woman on that episode who had put bleach in her eyes to fulfill her “lifelong dream of becoming blind.”
“Who is this supposed to be helping? The show says it’s trying to show a cautionary tale and help other people avoid...what, exactly? How many people want to blind themselves? It’s so exploitative,” he’d ranted.
Grant always joked that they should wrap up an actual soapbox and put it under the tree at Christmas so he’d have something to stand on when he argued with the news or broke down exactly why her shows were garbage. Paige smiles to herself at this, and then the familiar stinging behind her eyes threatens, so she gets up and pushes the thoughts away.
She needs a distraction, so she decides that it’s time to see if the plans she has set in motion have begun to take hold. She’s surprised Finn hasn’t called her yet since the other night, but she knows he’s pretending to be aloof for Cora’s sake.
She texts him.Hey, sexy. Miss me yet?She waits ten minutes before a reply comes back.
Who is this?it reads. Is he fucking serious? Okay, it’s his wife’s friend, maybe he wouldn’t have a reason to have her number, but she thinks he’s more likely just playing a game.
Was the other night so forgettable?she texts. Now this is vague because she knows he’s sleeping with a motel-hooker. She probably wouldn’t have his number, though. But she can’t be sure. She is sure, however, that he’s sleeping with Charlotte, too, so maybe he is just biting off more than he can chew, juggling it all, forgetting who’s who. He very probably has a secret phone for the exchanges with these other women. He’s probably panicking that Cora will see his real phone.
She looks out the window and sees Cora and Finn raking leaves together.Aw, how sweet.If he left his phone on the front step next to his gardening gloves and coffee mug, Cora might have seenthetext pop up. She didn’t, but he still looks furious. How scandalous of Paige.
You can’t text me like this, the message comes back. She sees him standing in the middle of the yard, looking down at his phone.
Why not?she replies. There is a long wait before she gets a response. She watches Mia come out of the house in leggings and an oversize hoodie. She goes right up to her dad, and Paige watches his face go white as he is startled by her and pushes the phone deep into his pocket. She holds her hand out and he gives her a set of keys. They say something Paige can’t hear. Then Mia goes to the car and gets in. Cora yells something to her—“Bye, honey!” it sounds like—but Mia doesn’t pay her any attention. Poor Cora, Paige thinks, but only for a moment because she is distracted by Finn, who looks like a man in quite a predicament. He stabs his rake into a pile of leaves and goes to sit on the stoop and sip his travel mug of coffee.
She watches him sigh and lean his head in his hand a moment. Cora doesn’t see this because she is distracted by Georgia, Paige notices. She watches Cora watch Georgia try to lean over to pick up her baby and then hold her side in pain. Then she kneels and breaks down the easy-assemble mesh sides of the playpen so she can move to Avery and be next to her. Odd, but she’s not thinking of that now. She watches Finn start to text, then he looks up. His look seems far away for a moment, like he’s trying to think, but instead he meets Paige’s gaze from her front window. She waves at him. He looks back at Cora to make sure she doesn’t see; he’s stunned for a moment. Then he stands up abruptly and goes inside.
I’m not sure why you’re texting me like this, the message says. Oh, she sees what he’s doing. He’s skilled at this. He’s covering his tracks, playing stupid in case Paige were to show Cora the texts from her side of things.
Meet me to discuss if you don’t want me to text you...or call you, she replies. She could be more threatening, but she should tread lightly so he doesn’t back away even more. There is nothing for a good while. She watches Cora look around for him a moment, but it seems like she’s not bothered that he’s gone because she walks off across the street.Dear God, I hope it’s not to bother poor Georgia.
A half hour later he replies,Wild Roast Coffee Shop at 4.
