Knox frowns. “But your sister?—”
I know where he’s going, so I shake my head before he can ask why I didn’t go to the only person whowouldbelieve me. “I couldn’t involve my sister in this. She didn’t need me bringing stress into her life while she was pregnant again. I felt so alone. No one would believe that Derek would tamper with my birth control and be so controlling that I was constantly tense, braced for whatever thing I’d done wrong, even though I’d memorized exactly how he liked everything done and could repeat it back to him without getting a single word wrong.”
Understanding flashes across Wyatt’s face. “You learned all our orders at the diner without needing to write them down.”
“When you have an avalanche of criticism waiting to be unleashed on you if you get a single thing wrong, you learn never to forget.” I look down for this next bit. “But words weren’t enough for Derek.”
“He hit you,” Elias says with quiet, furious intensity.
“It started small,” I admit in a voice as quiet as his. “He’d punch the wall beside me, apologize, and say he’d never actually hitme. Then it was a shove here and a slap there. He’d throw things at me. When I gave him a medium steak and not medium-rare, he punched me in the face, and I had to take a week off work to let the bruise heal so no one would see it. He got on his knees and cried when I started to pack my bag to leave him, but I could still see that he loved me. It was sostupidto stay, and I know that now, but things would go back to normal, and he’d be so kind and sweet for the next couple of days. Then things would get bad again, and he would lash out at me.” Tears slide down the bridge of my nose, and I brush them away with the back of my hand.
“What did you tell your work?” Knox’s voice is whisper-quiet, but if I were to look into his face, his eyes would be burning with rage.
“That I’d fallen down the stairs one night getting a glass of water.” I twist another tissue into thin strips. “After that, all the things Derek did to me were in places where no one would see.”
It wasn’t constant. The punches and kicks didn’t come every day, but they came often enough. I never truly relaxed, flinching when Derek or one of my co-workers stood up too fast around me.
I watched what I said, carefully picking out each word in case it was the wrong one, and it was almost always the wrong word. The man I loved spent years actively destroying me, breaking medown until I was a shell of myself. Then he made me quit my job because my nerves were shot.
The only thing I clung to was my determination never to bring a child into our home. I hid my birth control pills in a plastic bag in the toilet tank, and Ineverforgot to take them.
“Something else happened,” Wyatt says slowly. “Something that gave you an opportunity to leave him.”
Wiping tears from my cheeks, I lift my head to meet his gaze. “Derek was out one night after he closed a big deal at work. He was driving, and this time he didn’t wrap his car around a tree. He ran a red light and killed someone.”
My soft admission silences the room.
Clearing my throat, I continue shredding more tissue in my lap. “A loud knock on my door woke me up one night. I pulled my robe on, checked in the mirror to make sure it covered all my bruises, and went to answer it. There was a cop at my front door, his hat in his hands. He said there’d been an incident involving my husband and asked me if I wanted to sit down. I told him no. No one should wish for another person to die, but that’s what I was secretly wishing for. How cruel must a wife be to see a cop at her front door in the middle of the night and hope he was there to tell her that her husband was dead?”
“It was not wrong to wish your abuser would die,” Knox says, and I nod, but I don’t believe him.
It is wrong. What I did was wrong.
“What happened?” Hunter asks, rubbing a hand up and down my back.
“Cops had arrested Derek after the crash. He had a couple of scratches and bruises, but he walked away from it in one piece. His parents tried to pay the man’s family to make the problem go away, but they wouldn’t take the money. Their son had died, and they wanted justice for him. The judge sentenced Derek to one year in jail for vehicular manslaughter.”
Knox’s eyes widen. “He went tojail?”
“Before the sentencing, his lawyers had said he would get jail time. Even though they painted Derek as the perfect husband who never drank, there was no way to avoid it. I went to see him,” I say.
“He didn’t get bail?” Elias asks.
I shake my head. “The judge viewed him as a flight risk. His parents hadn’t been subtle about trying to make the problem go away, and the judge must have heard about it. I took divorce papers with me.”
“And he signed them just like that?” Wyatt blinks, surprised.
“He didn’t want to. I told him if he didn’t sign those papers and give me a divorce, I would stand on the bench outside church the following Sunday in just my underwear with a sign over my head saying my husband, Derek Brandon, was responsible for all my bruises.”
And I had so many. Too many for him to lie and say I’d fallen once or twice.
Elias’s mouth drops open. “Youthreatenedhim.”
I scrunch my face, ashamed that I could threaten anyone, but proud of myself at the same time. “It was my only chance to get away. Maybe not everyone would believe he’d done it, but theywouldwonder. And if nothing else, people would look at him differently when he got out of jail. His golden-boy reputation would go away forever.”
Knox tilts his head. “So he signed.”
“He signed. I got my divorce, he went to jail for vehicular manslaughter, and I packed up a bag and left Oregon in my rearview mirror,” I say.
