“That’s how I got this. Three years of marriage, and the first time he couldn’t control me with words, he used a glass.”
Logan’s jaw was set, and his eyes were on mine. The hardness in his face was aimed at what I was telling him, not at me. Good. I didn’t want soft right now.
“I drove to my parents’ house. Bleeding through a dish towel wrapped around my arm. I stood in their foyer and I told them what happened, and my mother looked at me and said I was being difficult.”
I could hear my own voice, and it sounded like someone I hadn’t met before. Even, clear, furious. “They told me to go back to Carter and work it out. So I left. But I drove myself to the emergency room. And after that, I went to a women’s shelter, and a woman I’d never met sat beside me and held my hand and asked me my name.”
My throat tightened.
“I told her my name was Lark. I chose it right there, sitting under fluorescent lights with a bandage on my arm and nothing to my name. I didn’t want to be Eleanor anymore. Eleanor was the woman my family made and Carter unmade. Lark was mine.”
The yard was quiet. The split wood lay scattered around the stump and my arms hung at my sides, and I was standing in the full weight of everything I’d just said without reaching for a joke or a clipboard or something to do with my hands.
Logan pushed off the wall and walked toward me. Stopped close enough that I could feel the heat of him but not close enough to crowd.
“You’re allowed to be angry about that, Lark.” His voice was low and direct. “You’re allowed to be pissed as hell. At him, at your parents, at every single person who should have helped you and didn’t. That rage you’re feeling right now is yours, and you’re entitled to every goddamn bit of it.”
Something in my chest unlocked.
I stood there and felt it happen. A physical sensation, as real as the ache in my arms and the raw skin on my palms. Something that had been sealed shut for years broke open, and I felt it go the way you feel a held breath leave your body when you didn’t know you were holding it.
No one had ever said that to me. I’d spent six years turning every wound into work, every ounce of fury into another fence mended and another animal fed and another person helped, because that was the only thing I knew to do with feelings that had no safe place to land.
My family had called anger difficult. Carter had made it dangerous. I’d learned the lesson so well I’d forgotten the feeling was mine to have. That I wasallowedto be angry.
Logan had just given that back to me.
The tears came, and they surprised me because they weren’t the kind I knew. They were hot and fierce and they burned my cheeks, and I let them fall without wiping them away because for the first time in my life, I was crying because I was angry and it was allowed.
“He called me selfish,” I said, and my voice cracked but it held. “He called me selfish for not talking to him. He said he doesn’t understand what he did.”
“He knows exactly what he did.”
“Yeah. He does.” I wiped my face with the back of my hand. “And I’m done carrying it for him.”
Logan’s hand came up, and his knuckles brushed the side of my jaw, rough and careful. He didn’t pull me in. He stood there with his hand against my face and let me be exactly what I was: a woman on fire who’d just discovered she was allowed to burn.
I kissed him. I put my raw, aching hands on his chest and kissed him because I wanted to. I’d just told a man every ugly, broken, furious piece of my history, and he hadn’t flinched and he hadn’t left and he was looking at me like I was the strongest thing he’d ever seen.
We went inside. Through the kitchen door, down the hallway. At the threshold of my bedroom, I stopped and he stopped behind me, and I stood there for one second with his hand on my hip and the afternoon light coming through the window.
I’d told him everything. And he was standing in my house with his hand on my hip and no intention of going anywhere.
The fear was still there. Carter’s voice was still in my ear and the mortgage was still on the table and the world was still the world. But right next to the fear, something stubborn and bright had planted itself and was refusing to move.
I reached back and pulled him through the door.
Chapter 17
Logan
Al Pacacino spat on a six-year-old at the birthday party within the first twenty minutes.
The kid fucking loved it. Shrieked with delight and ran back to the group, yelling that the alpaca had kissed him, which triggered a stampede of eleven other six-year-olds demanding their own alpaca kiss.
Al Pacacino surveyed them with the haughty disdain of a creature who’d been born knowing he was better than everyone in the room and stood his ground while Lark intercepted the mob.
We’d loaded the trailer before dawn and driven two counties east to the Hadley property, a spread of manicured lawn and white fencing that probably cost more to maintain in a month than Pawsitive brought in during a quarter. I’d hauled the portable pen panels out of the truck bed and had the petting area assembled before the first car pulled in.
