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“Do you think he’s looking for you?” I ask carefully. My instincts screaming at me to protect her, to get ahead of whatever nightmare might be coming her way.
“I don’t know. But he swore if I ever left, he’d drag me back…”
I hate that we’re having this conversation at my dinner table, where I can’t hold her, or comfort her while she’s reliving a nightmare.
But where else would make this easier for her?
I don’t have the answer to that. Because there’s nothing comfortable about this conversation, there’s nothing that I can do to erase the past hurts she suffered.
“Did anyone ever suspect what was going on?” I ask, reaching for her hand, trying to be as gentle as possible with her, but I need the whole picture before coming up with a plan to keep her and Audra safe. I marvel at the way she threads her fingers through mine. How she gives me this little piece of trust and lets me comfort her.
She shakes her head. “He made sure that I … kept quiet about it. The few times I had to go to the hospital, he was right there with me and made it abundantly clear that he had more than enough friends at work to cover for him if I ever tried anything.”
That fucking fucker.
“I hate that I have to ask this, Sunshine, but did you keep any proof? Anything that shows he was abusive.”
It’s a question I’ve asked before. It’s a question I hate having to ask. But this is different. This isn’t me taking a statement or trying to piece together what happened.
This is Maisie. This is my Sunshine. It’s never easy to ask the hard questions. When it’s someone I care about? It’s a million times harder.
In a perfect world, she wouldn’t need proof. In a perfect world, she would never have been hurt, or if she was, justice would have been swift. But we don’t live in a perfect world and having to ask this woman for proof of abuse makes me want to vomit the little bit of my dinner swirling around my gut.
Maisie snorts, taking me by surprise. “I have an entire folder in a secret email account full of pictures, and I wrote down every date he hit me or hurt me to correspond with the pictures. He used to go through my phone, but I’d wait until he was at work to document it and then I’d delete everything off my phone before he could find it.”
Genius fucking woman. Relief loosens my shoulders. “That’s good. That’s great.”
Every part of me screams not to ask the next question, but I still do.
“What do you want to do?” I keep my tone steady even when it threatens to close at the options I’m going to bring up.
Puzzlement covers her face. “What do you mean?”
“Sunshine, this is your war. I’ll be your army, but you call the shots. Do you want me to find him and eviscerate him before having him arrested and put in prison for the rest of his natural life? This is your life, your decision. If you want to keep going as you were, we can have you back on the road in the morning. If you want to stay with me — be with me, we’ll make that happen. But what do you want?”
If she says she wants to leave, to keep running, to stay safe the only way she’s known how, I’ll pack her and Audra up myself.
But god. I don’t want that. I want her and Audra here, with me, where I can keep them safe. Where I can stand between them and the asshole who wants to hurt her. On the road, she’s on her own — here… she has me, and I’ll fight to keep her safe until my dying breath.
I continue, “Or we can start taking the steps to remove him from your life permanently.”
A glimmer of hope shimmers in her gaze. “How?”
I latch onto that hope like a dog with a bone.
“I do some discreet digging. Figure out what he’s doing and where he is. We gather knowledge. And then we file a report on the abuse, on the sexual assault.” My throat tightens at the word. “We’d get an order of protection against him — a restraining order. If he violated it, he’d be tossed into jail, no questions asked. And then we nail the bastard.” My voice is demonic, the frustration and rage deepening and distorting it.
I’ve been either training to be or working as an officer of the law my entire adult life. The fact that someone would take the privilege of this job, the duty of it — it’s backbone — and use it as a means to do harm to another person is abhorrent to me.
“Can I think about it? I just … I don’t want anyone to know. I want to stay, I don’t want to run anymore, but I don’t want anyone to know.” She picks at the seam of her shorts as she whispers the words. “About what happened. Everyone here is already so nice to me, and I don’t want the pity that would come from anyone finding out.”
“Baby.” My heart breaks for her. “Fuck what people think, but you’d probably be surprised at other people’s reactions if they heard anything. But yeah, you can think about it before we do anything.”
She nods. “Thank you.”
I stand — needing to move, to shake some of this anger out — and take my mostly uneaten dinner and wrap it up before putting it in the fridge.
Audra’s squirming in her chair and making little noises when I come back to stand next to Maisie and hold out a hand. “Come on, let’s move to the living room.”
