“Don’t worry about it.”
“Are you going to be okay? If he realizes you helped—”
“He’s not going to find out anything. I’m going to be as shocked as him when he tells me you ran away.” He looked over at me. “I’ve got this, okay? I can handle him. Just get off the island and as far away as you can. Start over and don’t look back.” I saw the shimmer in his eyes, how hard he was trying not to cry. “I’ll never say a word.”
I knew he was remembering the time I caught him trying to put out the fire in the shop. He’d stolen our dad’s cigarettes and was practicing blowing smoke rings, until he dropped one into a pile of sawdust. I grabbed a water bucket and helped him put out the flames, then bandaged his arm where he’d burned it. “Don’t worry,” I whispered. “I’ll never say a word.”
But this was different. This was so much more real and dangerous than two kids covering up a small fire. I had a flash of a thought, an image. The cotton from the pill bottle sitting on the bathroom counter. I couldn’t remember if I put it in the trash. I must have. I still had the bottle with Chris’s name on the label. I’d get rid of it in a Dumpster somewhere far away. It’s the only way, I’d whispered. Chris had offered to help without a moment’s hesitation. Since he was a baby I’d been taking care of him, protecting him, but now the tables had turned.
You’re my sister, he said. We’re in this together.
* * *
I’d been awake for hours already, peeking out the curtains. Turns out I’d been right and Jackson got stuck in the snow. We’d missed the first ferry while he’d dug out his driveway and were now waiting to catch the eight thirty boat. Andrew was probably searching all over Lions Lake for me, driving to my parents’ house, then Chris’s. I looked out again, checking for Jackson. I didn’t want the hotel’s housekeeping staff or anyone at the front desk to see us. We had to run for the truck quickly. Sophie was also awake now, grimly chewing on a granola bar and watching cartoons.
“Jackson will be here soon,” I said.
She didn’t answer. She’d barely spoken all morning, but I saw her eying the phone and had a terrifying thought that she might call her father. When she caught me looking, she said, “I was thinking about Grandma and Grandpa. I didn’t get to say good-bye.”
“We’ll call them when we get to Vancouver, okay?”
“Can we call Daddy?”
“He’s going to be working all day.”
My new cell phone rang and we both stared at it. “It’s Daddy!” she said.
“It’s Uncle Chris,” I said as I picked it up, relieved but also nervous when I saw his number.
“Something happened.” Chris’s voice was wild and high. I’d never heard him sound like this and I sat down on the side of the bed. Sophie was watching, her face intent.
“Good morning, Chris.” I kept my voice calm, hoped Chris would understand that I couldn’t talk freely in front of Sophie. “Is Jackson on his way?”
“Andrew was in an accident. I just heard about it this morning. He wasn’t at the job site.”
I snuck a glance at Sophie. She was watching cartoons now, her feet kicking up in the air, her hands under her chin. I walked toward the window and lowered my voice. “Is he all right?”
“He’s in the hospital—he totaled his truck—but he’s okay.” There was something more. He sounded too shook up.
“When did it happen?”
“Last night—a couple of hours after you and Sophie left, I think.”
“I don’t understand how he could have been driving.” Two pills. It should have been enough, but he must have woken up somehow and realized we were gone.
“I don’t know either.” He paused. “It’s really bad, Lindsey. He ran through some red lights, hit a parked car, flipped the truck, then crashed into someone head-on.”
“Are they okay?”
“It was a woman. His truck landed right on top of her and crushed her inside her car. She’s dead.”
“Oh, no, no.” I had to sit down. I tried to get back to the bed, but the room tilted. I grabbed at the side table, knocking the lamp to the floor and shattering the bulb into tiny fragments. Sophie would step on them. I bent down and frantically gathered the pieces, and sliced my finger. I stared at the wound, my mind filling with images of mangled metal and blood in the snow. A woman. He’d killed a woman.
Sophie was clutching at my arm. “Mommy, Mommy!” she was saying, but I couldn’t answer. I could only sob. On the other end of the phone I heard my brother crying too.
I’d drugged my husband and run away with his daughter, knowing he would chase after me. Now someone was dead. I would never be free.
PART TWO
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
DECEMBER 2016
Sophie catches an errant string of melted cheese on her finger and sucks it into her mouth, laughs as some gets on her chin. I smile, glad for this moment. When she was a child, Andrew never let us eat in the living room, and there’s no way he’d let me order takeout.
I’d picked up a vegetarian pizza from our favorite place for our Thursday night tradition of watching The Bachelorette together. We talk about the guys, the dresses, who we’d pick. She’s been at Delaney’s all day, while I cleaned the house, trying to erase Andrew’s touch, his lingering essence, and rehearsed twenty different ways to have this conversation.
Sophie glances at me with a cheeky smile. “I saw the stew in the garbage. Were you trying to burn the house down?”
“Too bad for you I don’t have any insurance money.”
She laughs and takes a bite of her pizza, then leans back into the couch, pulling one of the pillows down under her shoulder. We both have our legs propped onto the coffee table. This would have been another unforgivable sin in Andrew’s eyes and I almost yank them away, can hear his voice in my mind. Only men sit like that, Lindsey. I force myself to hold still.
“There’s something we need to talk about.” I pick up the remote and turn down the volume. I can’t wait any longer, can feel the words clawing to get out.
“What’s going on?” Her eyes are wide, her mouth full of pizza. “Am I in trouble for something?”
“Should you be?”
“Of course not. I’m an angel.”
“Right. Well, your halo is a little tarnished.” Sophie is a good kid, but she’s done the normal stuff, sneaking booze, missing her curfew.
She reaches up, pretends to straighten an imaginary halo, then stops and gives me a look. “Wait. You’re not pregnant, are you?”
“No, no.” I’m taking too long to explain. I have to spit this out before she leaps to any other conclusions. “Your father was in our house yesterday.”
Her body jerks forward as if I had hit her. “What are you talking about?”
“When I came home, I noticed some e-mails were opened on my computer.” I hesitate about telling her everything I found. I don’t want to scare her too much.
“So you don’t know if it was actually him. It could have been a computer glitch.” She looks relieved, and I realize I made a mistake by holding back.
“I’m sorry, Sophie, it was definitely him. He opened all my bills and put a book beside my bathtub with some candles. There was no sign of a break-in, though.”
I see the look in her yes, the realization. “I forgot to set the alarm!”
I nod. “It’s okay. I know it was an accident—but you have to be more careful. This morning I talked to the police and applied for a peace bond—it’s like a restraining order. Andrew could fight it, but if it’s approved, he can’t come near me or he’ll get sent back to jail.”
She’s staring at me, two red splotches on her cheeks. “What do you think he wants?”
“I’m not sure, but he read an e-mail from Greg.… It was personal.” I’d called Jenny from my cell while I waited for the pizza and told her Andrew had been in my house. She invited me to Vancouver again, but I can’t walk away from everything yet. Not when Sophie is so close to graduat
ion and I’ve finally built my business up to a level where I’m not running in the red every month. This time of year is when I get extra bookings. I need that money to carry us through.
Sophie’s staring up at the TV, the glow casting a blue light on her skin. She swallows a few times and I know she’s trying not to cry.
“I saw him outside the bank a few days ago,” I say. “I was careful, but he must’ve followed me home and that’s how he found out where we live.” I think again about what he’d said. I know you drugged me. For weeks after the accident, I’d waited to see if the police had done any sort of blood tests. When nothing ever happened, I assumed I was safe. Would he tell them now? Could I get in trouble? I remind myself that it’s been over ten years and he can’t prove anything.
She turns and looks at me. “You didn’t tell me you saw him!”
“I didn’t want to scare you.”
“You should have told me.” She’s saying it almost desperately—and she sounds defensive, which doesn’t make sense. I’m clearly missing something.
“Sophie, what’s going on?”
She rubs at her face, presses the heels of her hands into her eyes, and sucks in a ragged breath. “You’re going to hate me.”
She’s looking at me now, her eyes pleading with me to understand, to say the words she can’t, but I don’t understand. And then I do.
“You’ve talked to him. You’ve talked to him and didn’t tell me.”
Now she’s crying, her face wet and her voice broken as she chokes out, “I didn’t tell him where we live. I never told him!”
“Jesus Christ, Sophie.” I’m up, pacing the room. “How could you do this?”
“He’s my dad. I have a right to talk to him!”
“You know. You know what he put us through.”
“He’s changed.”
“He was in our house. He’s the same manipulative controlling son of a bitch as ever and now he’s using you to get to me. What did you tell him? You must have said something, for him to find out we lived in Dogwood Bay. Did you tell him about me and Greg?”
“He was saying how he misses you, and I told him so he could move on.” She’s talking so fast I can barely understand her, but I get enough to know that I’m screwed. Truly screwed. This isn’t just a stage-one disaster. This has gone into a nuclear meltdown too-late-to-run explosion.
“Your father doesn’t move on, Sophie, and he sure as hell won’t ever let me move on.” I know I’m shouting, can see the stunned look on Sophie’s face, but I can’t believe she’s betrayed me like this. “I told you that your father was insanely jealous.”
“But that was years ago.”
I stare at her, trying to remember that she’s a teenager, too young to comprehend obsession and realize that years don’t matter. I’d told her everything he’d done and thought that would be enough warning. I never considered that fear would have a time limit in her mind. Maybe I should have told her about the sleeping pills, maybe then she would have better understood his rage, but it’s too late now. I sit down hard. “How did this happen? How did he contact you?”
“I wrote him. Then he wrote me back and sent it to Delaney.”
“Of course. That project you said you were working on. You lied to me.” I start laughing, a hysterical bitter laugh that I can’t seem to stop. “Of course.”
“He told me that he doesn’t drink anymore—and he’s really sorry.”
“It’s not just about drinking, Sophie. It’s about what is going on inside him. He’d need to be in counseling for years and I don’t even know if that would help.”
“He got counseling in prison.”
“Your father can’t handle his emotions, and that makes him dangerous. He’s only been out a few months and look what’s happening. You can’t see him.”
She looks away, her face flushing to a deep red.
“Oh, no. Tell me you haven’t met with him.”
“Only twice. I thought it would be okay. Then I could tell you that he was different so you didn’t have to worry. He was nice. We went fishing.…”
His hands are around my throat again, choking. The thought of them sitting together. I don’t want Andrew to have those precious moments with his daughter. He hasn’t earned them. He doesn’t deserve them. “You can’t see him again. Not while you’re living with me.”
“You’re threatening me?”
“He will kill me, do you understand?” I pause, holding her gaze, making sure that the words are connecting. “The only way your father will ever let me go is if I’m inside a coffin being lowered into the ground.” I reach out, grab her hand. “I know he’s your dad. I know how it must feel when all your friends have fathers and you don’t. I know how much you want things to be different and how much you want to believe him. I felt the same way for years. I gave him so many chances, Sophie. So many. But he can’t change. He just can’t.”
“He’s different, Mom. I can’t explain it. Maybe it wasn’t him in our house.” I can see in her face how much she needs this to be true and I hate that I’m the one who has to break her heart.
“It’s an act. It’s a game to him. All of this. He’s using you. I know that hurts to hear and maybe it makes you feel like you aren’t enough or something, but it has nothing to do with you. You are amazing. I love you with all my being, but to your father, we are possessions.”
She’s silent for a long time, her gaze focused on her pizza. She’s not crying anymore, just sniffling once in a while. I keep talking, trying to make her understand things that took me years of self-help books and joining a support group to finally realize, things I still don’t truly grasp, how love can go so wrong, how I could have fallen so far off the path and lost myself so deeply. How he can be so sweet and wonderful and charming and so vicious and cruel a minute later.
“I don’t feel very good,” she finally says.
“Me neither.”
“I’m never going to be able to eat pizza again.”
“Something tells me that’s not true.” I pull her closer. “I’m really sorry, kid.”
She lets out her breath in a sigh against my neck. “Do we have to move?”
“Not yet. We’re going to be careful and see what happens, okay?”
“Okay.” Her body sags into mine and I hold her close, crave the weight of her, and remember how she used to fill my arms. She’s slight as a bird. “I just wanted a father,” she says.
“I know, baby. I know.” I think I’ve gotten through to her, but I’m still unsettled at how easily he’d crept back into our lives. I thought I’d had it all covered, hoped that if I gave Sophie enough love she wouldn’t miss having a father. But she had. And he won’t give up. Not now. Will she be strong enough to withstand him? Is she stronger than me? God. I hope so.
* * *
Friday afternoon Corporal Parker calls with news that the judge has issued a summons for Andrew to appear in court Monday morning.
“Now we have to track him down so we can deliver the summons. We aren’t sure if he’s in Victoria or Dogwood Bay. He’s fallen off the radar.”
“That’s not comforting.” Andrew has a plan, I can feel it. Even if I packed our bags tonight, I have no doubt he would find us. “He could be waiting in my bedroom with a shotgun.”
“There are safe houses, and—”
“There are no houses safe from Andrew.”
She’s quiet for a moment. “I understand your fears, okay? I really do. And I want to help you. This is a step in the right direction. We’re going to get him.”
“I hope you’re right.”
When we pick up a tree from the mall on Saturday, I park where there are lots of people and hold my key between my fingers as I walk toward the entrance. At home we decorate the tree, then I clean up the fir needles, halting my vacuuming every few minutes to listen. Greg comes over after he’s finished work and installs a dead bolt and suggests we sleep at his house for a while, but I don’t think Sophie will like that.
I’m grateful for his help but I feel distracted, and pull away when he tries to be affectionate—teasing him about smelling like his work truck.
“Never bothered you before,” he says with a curious look, and I laugh it off, then lean in for a kiss so he doesn’t worry, but he’s right. I used to tell him he looked like a sexy grown-up Boy Scout in his UPS uniform, and I liked when he’d fix things around my house—but now it all reminds me of Andrew. He was always puttering around on the weekend, trying to make our house safer, which was ironic. I can’t stop wondering when he is going to move to town. He could already be here. I could run into him at the store, the gas station, anywhere.
Greg leaves after dinner and Sophie and I wrap presents and stack them under the tree and watch Elf while eating popcorn, but I know she’s forcing herself to smile and laugh for my sake. She didn’t draw all day, just flipped through the channels on TV or played on her phone.
“We need to do something fun,” I say.
“You’re taking us to Mexico?” she says. “I can be packed in five minutes.”
I feel the sting, but I know she didn’t mean to hurt me. She doesn’t know what happened in Mexico, how her father scared me. For years I told myself that I would take Sophie to Cancún again one day, just the two of us. We would do it right. Then, when I finally had enough money saved, I was too afraid of the memories. Something else I let him take away from me.
“Ha. But you’re giving me an idea.…”
Greg usually watches hockey Sunday nights, so I invite Marcus over. I’d feel safer with some male company, but that’s not what I tell him. I say, “You never let me pay anything for using your gym. Please let me do something nice?” He arrives with a case of Mexican beer and spicy dark chocolate for dessert. I roast corn and black beans and barbecue chicken for the quesadillas while Marcus makes salsa and guacamole. We work well together. Our shoulders brushing as we move around the kitchen, handing each other items from the fridge.