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“Lily—”
“Brady, it’s only going to get worse.” She was clutching me. Holding on like I was a rope. “This is just the beginning. Flowers are nothing compared to what he’ll do.”
“Not a fucking thing is going to happen to either of us.”
I would repeat that over and over until it registered.
Until she believed it.
Until she could say the words and speak them with confidence.
“Rewind for me,” I instructed. “Fill in some blanks by telling me how you two met and what he’s like as a person. The more I know, the better it’ll help me.”
She was silent while she stared at me, her grip gradually lightening. “We met at a bar. I’d gone out with Aubrey one night, and he was there with some of his friends. He didn’t come on super strong. That was what I needed—space and time to heal because, mentally, I wasn’t in the best place. I was mourning my parents and emotionally wrecked and vulnerable.”
“He picked up on that fast.”
Which set off my anger again.
“Yep. He knew just what to say and how to get me to trust him, and at first, he was perfect,” she continued. “But that didn’t last.” Her eyes turned haunted. “I should have run the second he began to change. My gut told me everything was wrong, and I didn’t listen to it.”
“He would have dragged you right back. I know the type.”
The manipulators. They were all the same.
I’d done business with plenty of them. I could write a fucking handbook on their practices.
I ground my teeth together. “What did he do when he changed?”
“It started with control. Who I talked to. Where I went. Without me even realizing it, he was making decisions for me, like paying off the remainder of my lease so I could move in with him. But it didn’t end there …”
She glanced at the ceiling. “I can’t even believe I’m about to say this, but he told me to quit my job, and I listened to him.” Several seconds passed before she locked eyes with me again. “He wanted me at his home. Accessible. That’s what he said anyway, but I know it goes way deeper. He couldn’t handle that I was gone, that I was with people who weren’t him. That I was staying places overnight. He was constantly accusing me of cheating, of not being there for him, of being a terrible girlfriend.”
The dude was a fucking psycho, and Lily hadn’t been strong enough to fight him off, so he had taken full advantage of her.
But this was what manipulators did.
The way they acted, their timeline of events.
They didn’t stop until they got everything they wanted.
“He treated you like property,” I spit.
“And I stayed.”
I cupped her cheeks. “But you found the courage to leave. That’s what matters. And you must have found it because you’re here.”
She focused on my right eye and then my left. “I fled when I no longer recognized myself. That’s when I knew it was time—when I couldn’t stand another second of him.”
The pain in her voice, the rawness—that was what I couldn’t fucking handle.
Along with the thought of her running from him, knowing he would do everything in his power to make her life hell once she did.
My fingers tightened on her face. “Did he ever hurt you?”
“He physically never laid a hand on me. He threatened to many times, and after the whole Preston thing, I took those threats much more seriously. As far as if he verbally abused me”—she gasped—“yes, he beat me down.”
My hands caught the tears that fell next.
