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“Okay.”
“Mellie, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. If I hadn’t drank so much—”
“No,” I tell him. “This is not your fault. Don’t do that.”
“Still—I’m gonna fix it.” He brushes my hair away from my face and tucks it behind my ear. “I’m gonna kill him for you, baby. I love you.” He leans in and kisses me on the cheek. He turns to Lisa and says, “Do not leave her alone.”
Ty closes the door, then Lisa starts the car and backs out of the driveway. I watch him climb into his truck and pull out behind us, heading toward town. Lisa turns and we head in the opposite direction down the mountain to the closest hospital in the county.
“Lisa, did you hear what he said?”
“Yes,” she says.
“He said he was going to kill him.”
“Good,” she says. “I don’t care.”
“You don’t think he really meant that, do you?”
She looks over at me and raises one eyebrow, then sighs and turns back to the road ahead.
“I think that if Grant is smart, he left town a long time ago. And I think that if he’s lucky, the police will get to him first.”
She didn’t exactly answer the question, but I heard her—loud and clear.
He meant it.
Three hours later, my broken nose is reset and bandaged. I’m leaning against the passenger side window of Lisa’s car, the evening sun hanging low on the horizon. We didn’t speak much at the hospital and haven’t spoken since we got back into the car. She listened to me recount the events to a female police officer, horrified and sobbing in the chair next to me.
And afterward, I couldn’t look at her.
I close my eyes for a moment, willing my body to relax—for the summer sun to somehow make me whole again, knowing it won’t work.
“I’m broken,” I say to Lisa.
“I can’t imagine how you must be feeling,” she says. “I don’t know what to say to make it better. But—you’re the strongest person I know, Mel. Don’t let him take that away from you. And you did the right thing—telling the police. He shouldn’t get away with it.”
“You want to know how I feel?”
Her eyes say no, but she nods anyway.
“I feel like my skin is covered in worms. I feel disgusted with my own body—like if I could just crawl out of it and into something else, something new, then maybe I’d be okay again. But I can’t do that, so I’m just stuck—trapped inside this worm-infested shell that I’ll scrub and scrub until my skin is raw, but I’ll never be able to get clean.”
“Mel, I’m—”
“Don’t take me home, Lisa. I can’t be there right now.”
“Okay.”
“He’ll pay for this, Mel,” she says as she pulls into her driveway.
“Are you sure?” I ask. “Because I’m not. They aren’t going to find any physical evidence.”
“There was a witness—”
“She put me in the bath, Lisa,” I tell her. “She gave me a bath and told me to get over it.”
“She was in shock.”
