It isn’t a question.Just a thread she’s been holding from some earlier conversation.“Yeah.”
“Everywhere?”
“Enough places.”
She lifts a brow.“Still vague.”She tests me.
“Still true.”That gets a smile.But this time she doesn’t let me sit in the mystery of it.
“Why’d you settle here?”
I lean back in my chair, looking out over the dark water.“Because leaving stopped feeling like freedom and started feeling like drifting.”
Her eyes stay on me.I can feel it.“Now we are getting somewhere.That’s more honest.”
“Don’t get used to it.”I tease.
“Too late.”
The waitress brings our food and breaks the moment before it can get too sharp.For a while we eat and talk easy.Small things at first.Quinn and kindergarten.The spring festival.The way Harold at the diner thinks subtlety is a government conspiracy.Lucy laughs more tonight than she usually does, and every time she does, I feel a little more fucked.
Then somewhere between the fish and the hush puppies, the air changes.
Maybe it’s the sun going down.The privacy.The ride there.Maybe it’s the fact that she trusted me enough to get on the bike.
Whatever it is, when I ask quietly, “How long’s he been chasing you?”she doesn’t pretend not to know who I mean.
She sets her fork down.“Too long.”
I wait.
She looks down at her plate, then out at the water.“I met Clint when I was sixteen.”
Clint.
Her voice stays steady, but I can hear the old tension under it.“He was a little older.Already out of school doing life.Charming when he wanted to be.The kind of man who made you feel like the room changed when he walked in.”A humorless little laugh touches her mouth.“I thought that meant he was strong.”
I don’t say anything.
She keeps going.“At first he was the rock I thought I needed.Turns out, life was simply being life, kicking me hard, and he happened to be the person in the right place to pick up the shattered pieces.My parents died in a car accident before I graduated high school.I was seventeen and didn’t want to be in foster care.He had his own place, offered to let me move in.It sounded like the next step in life.By that point I was in love, well, as much as a teenager can be.What started easy became intense.He did everything under the guise of being protective.Wanted to know where I was, who I was with.Made it sound like love.”
My jaw tightens.“I moved with him the first time out of my home town because he said it would be better.New start, better job, more space.Then something would happen and we’d move again.We started in Monroe, Louisiana and by the end we were down in Saint Tammany Parish just north of New Orleans.
Jesus Christ.
“He didn’t like me making friends,” she shares softly.“Didn’t like me having anyone other than him.He’d say we needed a fresh start, but really he just wanted me cut off every time I got too comfortable.By the time we had Quinn, things had escalated with his obsession with me.”
Rage settles low and mean in my gut.“He hit you?”
Her eyes flick to mine.“Not at first.It was a gradual thing.In the beginning, he would apologize.That turned into gifts, love bombing, apologies that meant less each time.”That answer is somehow worse.“He’d grab.Shake.Push me into walls.Throw things.Then cry after.Promise it would never happen again.”She swallows.“By the time Quinn was born, I was already trained, I guess would be the word.To keep things calm.To make myself smaller.”
I grip the edge of the table hard enough the wood creaks.“Don’t,” she says quietly.
“What?”I ask taming the madness crawling up inside me that this man treated Lucy this way.
“That look.”
I force my fingers to loosen.“What look?”
