I open the shower door, grab a towel, and dry off. I wrap it around my hair and twist it so it stays piled on top of my head. The room is filled with steam. The mirrors are fogged, so I wipe one down with my hand—the one behind the closed door that runs from floor to ceiling. And when I stand back, I observe the damage.
I am walking the walk of a victim for the first time. And now seeing for the first time the marks that have been left on my body as they develop. They are worse than I imagined, and I worry now that the girls noticed.
The giggling stops.
“Babe?” Mitch calls out for me. “I’m home. Are you okay?” His voice is upbeat, but I know he’s worried. He wants to see me, to see what this man has done to his wife.
I let out a quick breath to steady my voice. “Give me a second.”
I assess the damage in the mirror.
My right arm has the darkest bruises. Below the elbow, above the wrist. There is a thumbprint just beneath my armpit and a set of purple circles that could be some kind of tattoo the way they form a circular pattern. That was the arm he pinned over my head against the car after he spun me around to face away from him.
My left arm has a dark contusion above the wrist—the arm he twisted behind my back to immobilize me. Then he’d used his pelvis to hold it in place, freeing his arms to grab hold of my neck.
There is slight discoloration ear to ear. It hides in the shadows unless I tilt my head back, which I do now, to see how far I can let it go before the injury is exposed. Wade folded his forearms there, on either side. Then he’d jerked my head back into his chest so he could press against my carotid arteries. That’s why there is soreness in the muscles. I’d fought against him, but my neck was no match for the strength of his arms.
Finally, my hips—one with a bruise, one with a protruding vein. I think these are the worst of the injuries.
Standing before the mirror, observing myself, naked and exposed, my precious ones just beyond the door, the bruises map out the assault. It happened in an instant. It lasted less than a minute. It was stunning—in the sense that it stunned me. Caught me off guard. Unaware. Unsuspecting.
The miraculous connection, the answer to my question setting me free. He had seemed genuine in every way. Even in the psychological damage that had been done by the trauma we both endured.
And yet, suddenly, he had become violent.
The worst injury might actually be inside my head. I followed a stranger to a secluded road. I let my need drive me and override the danger I knew was there.I knew it, and yet I ran right into it. Ahead-oncollision.
Mitch is here now. Knocking softly. “Can I come in?”
I reach for the robe that hangs on a hook and pull it around me, tying it tightly with a sash. When we’re alone behind the closed door, he holds me, and I feel myself give in. He doesn’t ask for details, which means he’s spoken to Rowan. Instead, he asks me why.
“It isn’t like you to take that kind of risk. To put yourself in danger.”
How do I begin to explain what led me to that back road? I hear Landyn in my head. I need to tell him. I start at the beginning. The shot that killed Clay Lucas, and my doubts about whether I’d had to take it. Then the man who disappeared. How fucked up I’ve been since that day.
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
I give him the only reason I have. “I didn’t want you to see me the way I did.”
Mitch hangs his head and runs his hands over the beard. I wonder now if the beard is helping him hide what he’s been feeling these past two weeks. “I let you go through this alone. I didn’t see it.” He takes me in his arms again, and I listen to his heart. “Tell me what you need,” he whispers. “I’ll do anything.”
He’s said this every day since the shooting, and I’ve never answered because my needs were beyond his reach, and now I’ve finally told him. But where is the watershed of feeling? Why do I still not feel him? I hear a scream inside my head—telling him to take it away, to be my protector, to erase what’s happened. He managed to do that after the affair, cordoned it off so when we were like this, holding each other, we were skin to skin without a trace of Briana between us. I’m no longer numb, but something new has come between us, and I still can’t feel him. Not the way I used to. Before the shooting. Before the assault.
What has Wade done? I wonder now not only what is inside him that made him turn violent, but what is inside of me that I followed him, put myself in danger, and what is inside my husband that he can’t reach me.
I feel Mitch’s chest rise and fall as he holds back something that wants to come pouring out—anger at Wade, frustration at me, impotence within himself that he can’t make it all better. And I think back to what I said in Landyn’s office about never really knowing anyone.
I want it back. I want us back the way we were before I walked into Nichols to buy towels. Before I followed Wade Austin to that back road. I want to breeze about the kitchen, cleaning up after dinner, rattling off the facts of a new case, or hearing about his late supply deliveries or a funny anecdote about the whims of the wealthy—someone wanting marble imported from Italy or a light fixture exactly like the one they saw at some dinner party. I knew the things that made him laugh to himself because he told them to me and only me. And he knew how my cases churned inside, the rabbit holes I went down and obsessed about. He would take me in his arms and tell me all the ways he would pull me out of them, his hand running up my thigh, knowing just where to touch me. I want it back. I want it all back. I pull him tighter, my arms around his neck, but I can’t get through.
Mitch leaves, takes the girls downstairs, and I move slowly through the bedroom, putting on sweats, brushing my hair. Finally, Rowan calls.
I grab the phone, my heart already racing. “Tell me...”
“Where are you?” he asks. He’s out of breath, walking somewhere.
“I’m home. With Mitch and the girls.”
“Is the detail outside?”
