“What happened to me ... after?” Emma asked.
I glanced over at her as we passed beneath a streetlight, and, man, she was beautiful, even splotchy from crying, cakedin dirt, and visibly exhausted and terrified. Beau Broadturn was a goddamn idiot. And a fucking asshole. The last thing I wanted was to hurt this woman any more than she already was, but she deserved to know the full truth of what he had put her and her family through.
“It ain’t a pretty story,” I warned her. “You ready to hear it now, or do you want to wait until you’ve recovered a little bit?”
She huffed a humorless laugh. “I don’t think there’s any recovering from this.”
I reached out before I could think better of it, my hand landing on her shoulder, squeezing. “If anyone can recover from this, it’s you, Emma.”
Her chin wobbled, and her eyes grew glassy. “Thank you. I ... I think I’d like to hear the story now.”
I gave her one more squeeze and released her, returning my focus to the road because it was late, and these backwoods had a lot of deer in them. “Well, Beau had complete control over you from the start. Had you brought right over to the hospital without telling anyone there’d even been an accident. Your mama didn’t find out until the next day. She and you were supposed to have lunch, she said, and she kept getting your voicemail. Beau wasn’t answering her calls or texts, so she finally went to the police station to have them do a welfare check, and that’s when Ben Broadturn let it slip that you were in a coma.”
Emma tipped back against the headrest, her eyes closed. “Oh, Mama.”
“She was furious,” I said. “Went straight to the hospital to try and see you, but Beau said you were in too critical a condition for visitors. He gave her and your dad the runaround for another day before they forced their way in. Even then, they couldn’t do much. Beau was your medical power of attorney, your husband,anda doctor. He had theultimate control over you, and he wouldn’t listen to anyone else when they wanted to bring in outside specialists for a second opinion.”
Emma made a low, angry sound. “That son of a bitch.”
“Your dad tried to file a conflict-of-interest complaint with the hospital, but as you know, Beau’s dad is the head of the hospital, and he declined it. I think your parents were trying to go over his head to the state health-care commission, but bureaucratic bullshit slowed it down, and by that point, Beau had already ruled you brain dead.”
“Clearly, I am,” she snarked.
“He, um ...” Fuck, how to tell her this? “He didn’t give your parents a chance to say goodbye before he pulled the plug.”
Her hands fisted, all the warning I had before she leaned forward in her seat andscreamed. It was bloodcurdling, hair-raising, a sound torn straight from hell. Thank god no one else was on the road with us because it caught me off guard so bad I jerked away from her. We briefly swerved into the oncoming lane before I managed to straighten us out.
“I’m going to fuckingkill him,” she seethed.
“Not to toot my own horn, but Iampretty good at disposing of bodies.”
She turned my way. “Be careful about offering to help, because I’m dead serious. Do you know, I think he might have been trying to kill me for months?”
My hand tightened on the steering wheel. “What?”
“Even before the fall, I hadn’t been doing well,” she said. “I’d been sick for, like, half a year, and just kept getting worse with all these strange symptoms that Beau claimed he couldn’t figure out. He had me convinced it was some sort of autoimmune disease. The weird thing is, he went away for a week to a medical conference, and while he was gone, Istarted to feel better. When he got home, the symptoms got worse again. Looking back, I think he could have been the onemakingme sick, like giving me something, but at the time, I figured it was stress-triggered because our marriage ... wasn’t going well. Not just with the cheating rumors, but—god, this is so embarrassing to say out loud—he hadn’t touched me in months. Even if I begged him to. He blamed it on the sickness, but I’d also been gaining weight, and he hadopinionsabout that.” She buried her head in her hands. “Oh, Jesus, I can’t believe I just said that. I’m so sorry. We haven’t spoken since high school, and here I am oversharing about my sex life.”
I tried to shove my rage at Beau down and control my tone, but it was impossible. “We’ve trauma bonded,” I said. “The normal bounds of conversation no longer apply. Also? Beau is a fucking bastard. He should have been the one beggingyou. Christ, didn’t he realize what he had?”
She went quiet, and I wanted to kick myself because I’d probably crossed some kind of line, but goddamn, it couldn’t be helped. I wanted to kill Beau myself, not just for hurting Emma physically, but for the emotional damage he’d clearly done to her as well.
“Do you really mean that?” she asked in a small voice.
I shot her a look like she was crazy, because, hello? “You’re the most beautiful woman in the tri-county area, and if a man doesn’t make you feel like that every second of your life, then they don’t deserve to even stand in your presence. And I’m not just talking about your appearance. You got a beautiful soul, too, Emma Miller.”
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“You’re welcome.”
I flicked on my blinker, turning down the dusty road that led home.
“You know the craziest part of all of this?” she said.
I shook my head. There were too many options to choose from.
“I literally just crawled out of a coffin, and I feel better than I have in recent memory. If I really had that traumatic of a brain injury, if I was really in a coma, shouldn’t I, I don’t know, be all messed up from that? Instead, I feel fine. Well rested, even. Like I just woke up from a great night of sleep. I mean, I also feel weak as hell, because I’ve been immobile for ...” She looked at me in question.
“Including the time you were comatose, six days, give or take.”
