the knob on the door, she turned and looked at me. “Enjoy jail, Abby. It’s always nice when a daughter follows in her parents’ footsteps.”
Bitch.
I had to pull out the only card I had left to play.
“Hey, Bethany.” She glanced at me over her shoulder. “Did you know that photography was a hobby of mine?”
She froze and turned all the way back around. Her face had gone pale.
I felt a tickle on my nose and bent over to scratch it on the table. “I’m more of a documentary kind-of photographer, really. I like to tell a story with my pictures, you know? It’s amazing what the camera picks up when you’re naked in the mirror. Even in black and white photos, you can see where the purple of each bruise looks gray, where the dried blood looks almost black. You can almost see the yellow tone in the swelling of a black eye… or two.”
She crossed the small room in two strides leaned over the table, bracing both arms on it for support. “All that proves is that someone hurt you. It doesn’t prove who did it.”
“I have copies of the pictures and my statement of what happened that night in three different locations. If something were to happen to me, if Owen does this to someone else, or if you don’t follow through with my demands, there is a plan in place to send them to every newspaper and media outlet within a hundred miles. I won’t be the one rotting away in a jail cell. Owen will be. I’m guessing shortly after that, I won’t be the only rape victim in this whole situation, either.”
I was bluffing about everything but the photos.
She tried to stifle her gasp. She shifted her grip on the table before making her decision.
“Owen leaves you alone, and the charges against you are dropped. Is that what you want?”
“Yes. And I’m not signing a fucking thing,” I added.
She grabbed her briefcase and headed out the door. Sheriff Fletcher met her on the other side. A wicked smile crossed her lips. “I’ll think about it. In the meantime, Carl,” she said as she put her hand on Sheriff Fletcher’s shoulder, “please take Abby to the infirmary. It seems she needs medical attention.”
It was only a half-assed sucker punch to my cheek. It would bruise, but it didn’t hurt. It was a mosquito bite compared to what I’d experienced at Owen’s hands. “No need. I’m fine.”
“Are you?” Bethany winked over her shoulder at me as Sheriff Fletcher entered the room and closed the door behind him. He pulled a nightstick from his belt.
Oh. Fuck.
CHAPTER TWENTY
I AWOKE SO SUDDENLY, it felt like I’d been launched into consciousness. I sat straight up, flinging some sort of ice pack off my forehead and across the room. My ribs protested. I clutched them in apology.
I was in a small sea foam-colored room, I assumed in the infirmary at the police station. Coral Pines didn’t even have a real hospital, and the nearest emergency room was over thirty minutes away in the next town over. So when people had non life threatening injuries—or were beaten by the sheriff with a night stick—they came here, like a bunch of elementary school kids at the fucking nurse’s office.
The paper from the exam table crinkled under my movement as I slowly swung my feet over to the floor. There was a cotton ball with a small bandage over it stuck to my inner arm. I felt sore and woozy, and very much like I’d just gotten my ass kicked by a fat man swinging a heavy plastic baton.
I did a physical inventory. I started at my toes, wiggling each before I bent my knees and lifted my arms. I worked my way up, until I was pressing my fingers against my face to make sure my skull was still intact. I was swollen and in pain, and I may have had a cracked rib or two, but this time I knew I was going to live.
Dammit.
An older woman in pink scrubs walked into the room, staring down at a manila file in her hands as she moved. I recognized her as Glinda Mallory, one of the ladies from Nan’s church group. She flashed me what passed as a professional smile. There was little warmth in it.
“How are you feeling, Miss Ford? Do you know where you are?” She moved right to the second question as if she didn’t give a shit about the answer to the first. She pulled on a pair of latex gloves and tried to push me back down onto the exam table, but I dodged her. She reached for my face with one of her gloved hands, and I raced for the other side of the room, my head throbbing. “I can’t care for you if you won’t let me touch you.”
“You examined me while I was unconscious, right? You lifted my shirt up, saw what I had going on under there? Does it look like being touched has worked out for me?”
She closed her mouth and shook her head.
“I’ll be okay, really. Thank you for wanting to help.” Oddly, I was trying to comfort the nurse who should have been comforting me. “Do you have anything for the pain?”
I held onto my head with both hands in an attempt to gain some balance. I didn’t know if she knew what just happened here, but I suspected that, as the nurse at the Sheriff’s station, she knew enough not to ask.
She pulled off her gloves and tossed them in a red trash bin. “It isn’t advisable to take pain killers while pregnant, you know.”
She was just full of information I didn’t need or care about. “I’ll be sure to keep that in mind when I’m having a baby. For now, can I get some sort of drug to take the edge off all this? My ribs are fucking killing me.”
She grabbed her file and sat on a short rolling stool using her feet to wheel herself over to me. “I had suspected you didn’t know, but it’s proper procedure before administering any sort of narcotics to an unconscious person to test them for conditions such as pregnancy.” She didn’t even give me time to process that information before adding, “Do you know who the father is?”
“I’m sorry. What are you asking me?” I was trying to process the information, but between her cold distance and my throbbing head and ribs, it was difficult to understand her coded message.
“You may want to alert the father before you make any hasty decisions,” she added while scribbling on her clipboard. “You can always come see the ladies group at the church. They are really good at handling cases like yours.”
Cases? Like mine?
“Father?”
“Yes. As in father of your unborn child. You’re pregnant, Miss Ford.”
My chest tightened, the pain increasing with each breath as they got shallower and shallower. I couldn’t hold air in my lungs. The room started to spin. The nurse came and went in my line of site. Seconds earlier, I was holding my head in order to ease the ache. Now, I was just trying to hold my shit together. I had to think.
Jake and I were careful. We used condoms.
The only thing Owen had used was me.
My life was more than just a single disaster. It was many disasters, all happening at the same time. It was a tsunami after a hurricane after an earthquake happening in the middle of a tornado, while a wildfire blazed in a circle around me. I waded through the wreckage of one and right into the next.
I was pregnant, and Owen was the father.
***
Two minutes can be a lot longer than most people realize.
Two minutes was all it took for me to move from liking Jake to loving him.
After I was released from the jail on my own recognizance, pending Bethany's decision to send me to prison or not, two minutes sitting in front of that plastic fucking stick was torture.
I’d decided to take a home test to see if the nurse had lost her goddamned mind, or if I’d lost mine. I lifted it from Sally’s Corner Store on the way back to Jake’s apartment. But I left the exact amount of money for the test on the shelf where I found it, right after I’d shoved it into the front pocket of my hoodie. I wasn’t ready for the town to know something I wasn’t sure of myself.
After counting down the ticks on the second hand of the old wall clock above the desk, I took a deep breath. I was probably just over reacting. I was sure I was going to laugh about how stupid I was being in just a few m
ore seconds. I knew the universe was cruel, but I didn’t think it could be this ridiculous.
I didn’t think that, after everything I’d already dealt with, I could actually be carrying my rapist’s child, too. I was only seventeen. I prayed to a God I wasn’t sure existed.
Please no... please no... please no.
When the second hand hit the twelve for the second time, I lifted the white stick and gazed into the little window.
I had never seen a more menacing pair of parallel lines.
***
Just a little while longer and it will all be over with…
“Abby Ford?”
It was another nurse in pink scrubs calling my name, measuring me, making me pee in a cup and giving me the once over. Only this time, it wasn’t in the Coral Pines police station.
A doctor with salt-and-pepper hair introduced himself as Doctor Hodges and promptly asked me to lie down and put my feet in the stirrups. He looked to be in his mid-fifties. He was calm and friendly, but wasn’t going to be performing the procedure just yet. He explained that it was just the initial exam before the big show.
My words, not his.
I closed my eyes and took deep breaths as he poked and prodded with cold instruments and intruding fingers. It was so uncomfortable. The burning inside me built to epic proportions. My eyes watered and a tear ran down my cheek. I had to power through. I tried to sing in my head to distract myself from what the doctor was doing.
When that didn’t work, I thought about Jake.
I wonder if Jake would have gone with me if he knew the truth. If he knew that I loved him and hadn’t willingly let Owen do what he did to me. I couldn’t let myself linger on those thoughts. I was pregnant with another man’s baby, and I needed not to be anymore.
“Miss Ford, I know you already spoke to the counselor so forgive the repetition here, but may I ask, what brings you here today?” He gestured for me to sit up.
Relief flooded me instantly.
“I don’t want to be pregnant anymore.” I wondered if that wasn’t the reason every seventeen year old came here.
“How did you get pregnant, Miss Ford?” His voice was steady and professional, but I sensed something else lingered behind his question.
“Is there more than one way?” I faked a laugh to distract him.
He looked at me skeptically. “Miss Ford, I am going to be honest with you. I see scar tissue within you that suggests you’ve been through a traumatic injury recently.” He took a deep breath and flicked his rubber gloves into the trash bin. “Frankly, I am surprised a pregnancy resulted or survived such trauma.”
It was a statement, but he looked as if he wanted me to confirm his suspicion.
“Resulted,” I blurted. I instantly regretted telling this stranger anything that wasn’t his business.
“Have you filed a police report?”
“No.” But, I’m facing some pretty hefty charges myself.
The Doctor didn’t press me on why I hadn’t. He just nodded as he placed a manila file on his knee and started to write with a fountain pen from his lab coat pocket. He shook his head from side to side, like something he was writing was almost unbelievable to him. “Strong fetus you’ve got in there.” He looked up from his file, his embarrassment written all over his face. “I’m sorry. That was entirely insensitive of me. My apologies.”
“It’s fine.” I wanted to silence his rambling. I hated being apologized to. After all, he was right. This thing in me had such a will to be in this world, it had found a way to exist during the worst of the worst of conditions.
It was a survivor, just like me.
And I was going to kill it.
***
I spent the next three days searching for a new job with no luck. Bubba still wasn’t hiring seventeen year olds. Sally’s wasn’t hiring. The bait shop wasn’t hiring.
Jake’s home was no longer my home so I was back to sleeping in Nan’s old Chevy, the same one Jake had caught me in all those weeks ago. I’d put his keys on the counter, locked the door, and shut it behind me.
I didn’t want to live there anymore anyway. Just being there long enough to grab some of my shit and lock the door was painful enough. A few times I could’ve sworn I’d heard his bike pulling into the drive. I had to remind myself it wasn’t him.
He was gone.
The Chevy couldn’t be home forever, but it was all I had for now. I’d made a little money working at Jake’s shop, but the hotels on the island were tourist traps, and a single night’s stay was more than half of what I had to my name. I tried to rent a room, but being seventeen and jobless wasn’t exactly an attractive mix to potential landlords.
I lay in the Chevy, tossing and turning.
It wasn’t just the stagnant heat of the night air that kept me restless.
Has it really been only days since I had last seen him, since I let him walk away? Where is he? What is he doing?
Jake had assumed the worst of me, and with that assumption he revealed that we didn’t have what I thought we did. He didn’t love me the way I loved him. As far as he was concerned, it was all or nothing.
I promised myself I’d push all thoughts of Jake out of my mind, in hopes of pushing him from my heart.
Yeah, right.
Even I didn’t think that was going to happen. In time, I hoped he would become just a distant memory. Now, though, his memory was so strong, if I allowed it just a moment to occupy my mind, it consumed me. I closed my eyes and could still feel his breath on my cheek, his skin on my skin. I would never again be able to let myself be as free as I was with him. That girl was gone.
Survivor Abby had returned, boundaries and walls firmly back in place.
Choosing the comfort of being numb over the pain of heartbreak.
On what was to be my third night of sleeping in the Chevy, I climbed in through the driver’s side door and plopped myself down on the bench seat to get some much-needed sleep. I’d spent the entire day walking up and down the island looking for work and was just drifting off when I heard something jingle. There in front of me, reflecting the light of the full moon, was a key ring with two small gold keys and a large silver Ford emblem key chain hanging from it. The keys were attached to the steering wheel by a large janitor-style hook. A Dunn’s Auto Repair sticky note was attached to the center of the wheel. The note on it appeared to be written by a child:
abby
the apartment is urs fer as long as you need. yu can use the truck too it needs to be run ery once in a while and settin in the lot aint doin it no good. I dont no what happened with jake and I dont care but I know he dont want you sleeping in the fucking truck like a dam hobo. reggie is pissed you aint showed up fer work so be there in the morn. sorry about the punching ur face thing. Im a drunk asshole most of the time.
sorry again.
frank dunn
Tears stung the back of my eyes. Despite the fact that he’d called me a hobo, it was by far the greatest note I had ever received. I held the necklace Jake gave me in between my fingers, as it had become my nature to do when I was thinking. It would be my constant reminder he wasn’t just a dream.
It had certainly felt like one, though.
I hadn’t even been sure that Frank remembered who I was, especially under the circumstances of our first encounter. But there I was, reading his offer of salvation.
The Dunn men may have seen themselves as being worlds apart in every way, but when it really came down to it, both men were deeply troubled by pasts they’d rather forget, and they both had laid themselves on the line for me when I really needed it.
Selflessly. Easily.
It was in these acts of kindness that I saw the similarities in them for the first time.
I laughed to myself because Jake would shit a brick if I ever told him that he and the man he hated most were in any way similar.
Mr. Dunn had just offered me the chance to save money and have a place to stay when the baby came.
T
he baby...
I didn’t know if I would be a good mom, or if I would even be