“Is that…?”she started.
“It is,” Aurelie confirmed.
“I thought he was…”
“Me, too.”
“It sounds like he bought off someone in power because he’s already out, meaning he’ll go public with the sales and start building any day now,” Jace added.
“Jesus,” Paige whispered.“It’s like what happened with your mom.”Aurelie nodded, relieved her friend understood the implication of the news.Paige beckoned her to the couch, patted the seat beside her.
“I’m so sorry I questioned your motives the other night.This is bad.”
“I know.But it’s okay.We just have to tell Sophie.”
Paige nodded.Owen and Brad stood still as stone in the kitchen until Owen shook his head.
“Now, wait a minute,” he said, putting his hand up.“Back up and fill us in.What the actual fuck is going on, and who the hell is Isaac Puckman?”
Jace started from the beginning with his inquiry into the sales, then Paige picked up with who Isaac was and why he was as dangerous for Sophie and Analise as he was for Banberry.The two brothers-in-law listened intently to the story of Analise’s abuse, of Sophie finding her in a dilapidated shelter, and how that night led to Sophie buying land to build a proper shelter with space for a clinic, which was now almost complete.Every sordid detail made Aurelie wish chronic incontinence on Isaac as well as whoever had shortened his sentence by 300 percent.
It also reaffirmed that she had to stay in Banberry and give her services to both the shelter and clinic.There were too many women like Analise who needed help, help that was scarce at best in a rural town like Banberry.
Brad called Sophie and left a message for her to call him as soon as she had a break in court.He tossed the phone on the couch and ran his hands through his hair.His cheeks were pulled taut by a tight jaw that seethed with anger.Aurelie could tell he was reeling, wondering how the hell to protect his wife when her job consisted solely of putting abusers and worse behind bars.She felt the same way he did, but Sophie knew what she was doing.It was one of the reasons she was such a strong woman: Someone had to take on the burdens the battered and helpless women who came to her couldn’t carry alone.
“What happened to your mom?”Jace asked Aurelie.For some reason, it seemed natural that he was there, counted among her family as they discussed the fate of Banberry, but the question highlighted how little everyone in that room, save Paige, knew of her past.
She looked to Paige for strength.Her friend nodded.Owen and Brad sat down on the two overstuffed chairs that flanked the couch, gazing at Aurelie expectantly.Sharing the trauma from her youth was always difficult for Aurelie, but this was her family now, and the same thing might be happening to them.
“My father abused my mother my whole childhood until I was fifteen.He broke bones and left bruises, but otherwise only hurt her enough that it could be explained away as an accident.”Brad lowered his head, shook it, and put it in his hands.Aurelie almost stopped right there, but Jace moved from the arm of the couch to the small empty space next to Aurelie and wrapped her hands in his, squeezed tightly.No one seemed to notice that the person comforting her was a stranger.“My brothers were younger and tried to intervene, but he’d slap them around as well.Until one night, my dad knocked my mom unconscious, and my middle brother, Rami, came at him with a handgun he’d bought off the streets.He was only twelve.”
The room was silent, everyone leaning in to listen to Aurelie.Talking about that night, about the events that followed, seemed at once like they’d just happened yesterday, the hurt was so fresh, and also like she was telling someone else’s story.It was impossible to juxtapose that life with the one she led now, to reconcile both inside her memories.
“Anyway,” she continued, “Rami forced my dad to pack his things and leave, which he did, but he promised he would come for the house, for us, for my mom, and especially for Rami at some point.”She took a deep breath and closed her eyes.Jace’s hand rubbed her lower back, calming the tremble in her muscles from the tension.
“He kept his promise.It took him ten years, but every day we lived in fear of what he would do to get back at us.Rami turned to the streets, to brothers who understood the fear and trained it.Emri, my youngest brother, followed him a couple years later.Then my mom got sick.I was able to make the payments on the home with my job, but one day, bulldozers showed up on our land.My father was still listed as an owner, even though the land and home had been in my mother’s family for three generations.He threatened to sell the land out from under us if my mother didn’t take him back.By then, only my mother and I knew she was sick, and my job wasn’t enough to care for both of us, not with her medicines and treatments.Eventually, in order to take care of her and get her someplace safe, we relinquished it to him.It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to go through.I just don’t want you to have to go through the same.”
The room was silent enough to rival the quiet before a hurricane, the stillness suffocating while Aurelie waited to see what her friends would say.
“Is your dad still there?”Jace said, his voice resonating in the otherwise tomb-like living room.
“He is.I didn’t see him the last year I was there but once, and I don’t think he saw me.I found a stash of drugs in the house and called them in.After that, he was put back in prison—all because of me.”She looked again at Paige, who had been there with her that night.Paige had held Aurelie as she sobbed, racked with guilt and fear that her dad had seen her, that he would do something rash.He’d been sent to prison twice since her mom kicked him out, both for violent crimes.Aurelie didn’t have a moment’s doubt that her father would hurt her—or worse—if he got a hand on her.It was part of why she was petrified even to consider returning to the islands.
“That’s why you showed up ready to work when I met you at the bus stop, isn’t it?”Owen asked.Aurelie smiled and nodded.
“I needed an escape.I figured Banberry would be a nice stopover, but I never considered that it might become home.”
Paige squeezed Aurelie’s shoulder with the hand not cradling her daughter.“You and I both, sister,” she said.Everyone shared the same wan smile except Jace, who was looking at her as if she had done something wrong.His brows were pulled tight, and any hint of his traffic-stopping smile was long gone.She recognized the look as one she’d tossed him a few times the day before.
“You won’t go back, will you?”Jace finally asked, his voice laced with anger and something else she couldn’t register.Concern?For her?“You can’t, Aury.You just can’t.”
He was referring to their conversation earlier at the bar, when she’d all but told him she might have to leave.Was he drawing the connection that if she did, she’d be heading back into her maniac father’s arms?Aurelie’s resolve cracked at the now unmistakable sound of protectiveness in his voice.She’d known him for only mere hours and already he was beside her, joining her army of protectors.
He was a decent man.
“Of course she won’t,” Paige said, leaning over to hug her friend.“She’s stuck with us.”
But of course, she didn’t know Aurelie had kept one part of her story out, a part that could derail everything she’d built for herself, including her friendship with Paige.Paige had no idea about Aurelie’s visa, her father’s release.They were supposed to be sisters, and Aurelie was withholding a crucial part of the story.
