by Dana Nussio
“Tell me the truth, Sarah. If it isn’t the police you’re afraid of, then what—or who—are you hiding from?” His jaw tightened and his molars ground. “Is it him?”
This time, instead of answering, she made a strange sound in her throat, and the glass she was rinsing slipped from her fingers and shattered on the stainless steel on the empty side of the sink. Shards of glass shot out against the four sides and slid down the garbage disposal.
Reflexively, Sarah reached for it, but Jamie caught her hand, then stretched past her to shut off the water. She gripped the edge of the sink and closed her eyes as her shoulders slumped.
Suddenly, memory snapshots rushed at Jamie from all directions. All those examples he’d given her and more. That raw look in her eyes, the one she thought no one could see. Well, he’d always seen it, even if he’d been too dense to understand it. Now the same chimes that always jolted her clanged in his ears, loud and discordant, and with the bottomless feeling in his stomach, he knew.
Lovely Sarah, the ethereal beauty who’d invaded his thoughts and captured his dreams was also one of the bruised faces behind the sterile statistics of women preyed on by an intimate partner. Only she was somehow still here, when many had fallen to those hateful hands.
Her arms were trembling visibly where she’d braced her hands, and he longed to reach out to her, but he sensed that she might not want to be touched. Instead, he pulled out the chair where he’d been sitting because it was easier than scooting to the other side of the table.
“Here. Sit.”
“But...” She gestured toward the mess in the sink.
“Let me get it. Do you have rubber gloves?”
She pointed to the lower cabinet as she lowered herself in the chair. He slid on the gloves and placed slivers of glass inside the cracked bottom. Then he pulled the trash can from beneath the sink and dropped it inside.
“I can do that, you know.”
“I know.” He picked up as many pieces as he could and then dampened a paper towel to collect the rest. “But let me help, okay?”
He was talking about far more than shards of broken glass, and she must have understood that as she watched him for several seconds before looking back to the table. A few heartbeats later, her chin lowered as if she could no longer balance the weight of her secrets.
Her “okay” came so softly that he would have missed it if he weren’t straining his ears to catch any sound. Fury spread through him, making his hands, face and neck hot. How could some idiot she’d trusted with her precious heart have betrayed her like that? And why had he been allowed to keep breathing if he had?
“What did he do to you, Sarah?” Jamie whispered, as he moved to the seat across from her and sat. Of its own volition, his hand stretched out to brush hers. She flinched before he even touched her, so he slid it back.
He cleared his throat. “Where is he now?”
“Right now?” She glanced over at the stove clock. “Probably locked in his cell for the night.”
“He’s incarcerated?”
“Yeah.”
The tightness in his chest decreased by tiny increments. The guy couldn’t lay his hands on her. At least for now. Jamie didn’t kid himself into believing that would be forever. He’d witnessed too many of the failures of the criminal justice system to believe that many felons ever got the sentences they truly deserved.
Unable to stay seated, he stood and paced into the living room, the tiny space squeezing tighter around him. He turned to find her staring at him, not at his face but lower. He followed her gaze to his hands. They were fisted at his sides. He forced them to unfold and wiped his sweaty palms on his jeans, ignoring the sting from where his nails had dug into his palms.
“Aren’t you supposed to be a peace officer?”
“What do you—” He cut his own words off, took a deep breath and released it. She had to know that the thoughts going through his head weren’t close to peaceful. What was wrong with him? Hadn’t Sarah already known enough men who controlled their world with their fists?
“Sorry.” He cleared his throat. “I’m also sorry for whatever he did to you.”
Though he expected to see fear in her eyes when she met his gaze again, there was only caution there.
“So I was right that you hadn’t shared your whole story with me?”
“I might have omitted a few details.”
“Care to fill in some blanks?”
“Like an abusive ex-husband in prison?”
“How about the whole story?”
Her own hands, gripped in front of her, held her attention for a long time, but then she gestured for him to return to the table. He sat and waited for her to tell her story in her own time.
“Like I said, my story is an embarrassing cliché. You said you missed signs about your brother. Well, if you looked up a list of warning signs for teen dating violence, there would have been a photo of us on the page.”
Her expression tightened, and then she took hold of her locket and started twisting it.
“Like what?” he said. “Did his last three girlfriends have restraining orders out on him?”
She was finally sharing, and even if every word was stabbing him in the chest like a pen knife puncturing his skin, he had to keep her talking. He had to know.
“No, but Michael blamed every one of them for their breakups. Red flag number one. He was also controlling, almost from the moment we started dating, when I was sixteen. He was twenty-one. He didn’t like me hanging out with my friends and said it hurt his feelings that he wasn’t enough for me.”
“Were those the only things?” They were enough to get his heckles up, but then Jamie knew the signs. Had witnessed some of the devastation to which they could lead.
She shook her head. “He texted and called all the time to ‘check in’ and then looked through my text messages when we were together. He had a short fuse. He pressured me for sex...until I finally gave in.”
It was all Jamie could do to keep his hands flat on the table, when he wanted to wrap them around the asshole’s neck. At least she couldn’t see that every muscle in his body had tensed.
“I don’t know how anyone could have picked up on tiny hints like those,” he said.
Joking, even if it wasn’t funny, was better than punching a hole in the wall, which he also was tempted to do. He’d never punched a wall in his life.
“That’s just it. Others did pick up on them. My parents. Friends. Teachers. My parents forced me to break up with him.”
“Which made you desperate to be with your poor, misunderstood boyfriend.”
She cocked her head to the side. “Have you heard this story before?”
He nodded. Too many times for someone who’d been on the job only two years.
“Well, you’re right. I said they just didn’t know him. He’d never hurt me at that point, except maybe to grip my arm too tight. And sometimes I did say things that provoked him.”
She folded her hands on the table. “When I became pregnant when I was seventeen, my parents refused to sign the permission form so that we could get married. They said they would support me and the baby, but only if I stayed away from him. I didn’t believe they would cut me out of their lives if I married him when I turned eighteen a month later, but they did.”
“How long after that did he start hurting you?”
“Not long. When he realized that my parents really weren’t going to help us out, even for the baby’s sake.”
“But you said you lost the baby.”
She nodded, her eyes damp. “A few weeks after we were married.”
He was tempted to ask if the time corresponded to the beginning of the physical abuse, but he worried the question might push her too far.
“Did you go the police when the abuse began?”
The words wer
e out of his mouth before he could stop them, and her narrowed gaze told him they’d struck soft tissue.
“No, I didn’t. I was ashamed. And he said he was sorry. He promised he’d never do it again.” She lifted her chin. “And before you ask it, I didn’t try to leave at first, either. By the end, I was convinced I had nowhere to go, and the police wouldn’t help, either.”
“A lot of victims believe those things.”
“Sometimes they’re right.”
Her pointed stare sliced right through him then. Had the people she trusted failed her? Had the police? Had she been able to trust anyone at all?
“Even your parents wouldn’t help?”
“I couldn’t ask them. I was too embarrassed. I’d also alienated all my friends. Except one. Tonya.” She smiled as she said the woman’s name. “She refused to let me push her away and said she would help when I was ready. But I stayed. And stayed.”
“Would he have let you go if you’d tried?”
She shook her head. “At first, he said he would kill himself if I left him. Later he said he wouldn’t let me live without him. But as the bumps and bruises became cracked ribs, a fractured eye socket and worse, I realized I wasn’t going to survive, either way.”
As she stared off toward the sink, she rested her right hand over her upper left arm and absently rubbed her thumb on the skin beneath it. It was another of her habits, something she did at work with her hand covering the cuff on her uniform sleeve. Now he couldn’t help but wonder what was hidden beneath that sleeve.
“That last time, I almost didn’t.”
At first her words didn’t make sense, but when he connected it back to her comment about survival, his breath was trapped in his chest. The image of Sarah’s body stretched out on one of those slabs at the medical examiner’s office flashed before his eyes, forcing him to squeeze them shut.
That bastard had tried to do that to Sarah.
When he opened his eyes again, she was watching him.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to share so much.”
“I did ask for the whole story.”
“You did, but you didn’t ask for the gory details.”
He should have been able to handle those details. He was a trooper at a full-service post, for heaven’s sake. He handled many types of cases and had seen plenty of carnage on highways and in homes, most from a polite, professional distance. But this was Sarah. The thought of what could have happened to her would have dropped him to his knees if he wasn’t already sitting.
“Well, it’s good that he’s serving time. Was his conviction for attempted first-degree murder or aggravated domestic battery?”
“You might not want to hear the answer to that one.”
He frowned. “What did he plead down to? Jaywalking?”
“He was never charged for any crime for hurting me.”
“How is that even possible?” Jamie swallowed. “Did you get one of those Neanderthal officers who told you not to waste anyone’s time by pressing charges, since you’d just drop them when the two of you made up?”
“Close. These officers were his buddies. Or at least he was their informant. When they caught him doing his side job of selling opioids to teens while working for a copy-machine-service company with contracts at areas schools, they made him work for them. Then, after I’d spent two weeks in the hospital fighting for my life and I was finally ready to fight back...”
Although he knew what she would say, he had to ask. “They shielded their informant from charges so that they wouldn’t jeopardize their investigation, right?”
“How’d you guess?”
Jamie could only shake his head. “I’m so sorry.”
“As long as he kept providing good information on his supplier, and perhaps participated in dirty side deals with a few of them, he was golden. But he must have double-crossed them somehow because he ended up in prison, after all.”
“Possession with intent to distribute?”
“Six to twelve years. He got lucky, too. If he’d faced the charge for dealing near a school, the penalty would have doubled. And I was lucky that I got a sympathetic judge, who granted my divorce while he was still in prison, because Michigan law makes that tough to get. But when I showed the judge the police reports I’d filed that went nowhere, and the photos...” She paused, shrugging. “Even then, he made me wait until Aiden was born before it could be finalized.”
“At least he’s never had the chance to hurt him.”
“He will never get the chance to hurt my son.”
She only whispered her answer, but her lethal promise unsettled Jamie. He didn’t have to wonder to what lengths she would go to protect her child, whom she’d referred to as hers alone.
She sounded so determined that he couldn’t bring himself to mention that her ex wasn’t serving a life sentence and would probably be granted visitation upon his release. If Jamie knew of cases where even convicted child predators were granted visitation with their children, Sarah didn’t stand a chance of keeping the guy away from their son.
“I’m just glad he can’t get to either of you.” At least for now, the subconscious part of him that refused to be quiet added. “But with him behind bars, I don’t understand why you’re always watching for him over your shoulder.”
“Old habits die hard, I guess. And maybe because, even before the divorce, he said he had people watching me, in case I was, you know, whoring around like he was sure I would be while he was gone. As if I even wanted any man to touch me.”
Sarah blinked, as if that last confession had surprised even her. She shifted in her seat, looking anywhere but at Jamie.
“So that he could continue to control you, even while he was on the inside,” he said, avoiding the other sensitive topic.
Her tongue darted out to lick her lips, and she looked back to him again.
“I just always feel as if one of his friends is just around the corner, waiting for me.”
“That has to be awful, always waiting to be ambushed.”
She only shrugged.
“I just want you to know that if ever you’re not feeling safe, you can call me. Any time. If ever you feel like one of his friends...” He let his words fall away as she smiled back at him.
“That’s kind of you, but—”
“It just seems like everyone betrayed you.” He rushed on, interrupting before she could push him away again. “Your ex. Your parents for cutting you off when you really needed them. Those officers, when you could have been—” He grimaced. “No wonder you hate cops. Please tell me these weren’t Michigan police officers.”
She shook her head. “Illinois. And I never said I hated cops.”
“You didn’t have to say it. You’re an ice princess around all the Brighton Post guys.” But even as he said it, so much more made sense now. Of course, she would have been uncomfortable around some of the more self-assured among his trooper friends. They would have reminded her of her abuser. Or maybe of those officers who’d, at best, traded her safety for information, or at worst, to line their own pockets.
“Anyway, I, uh, don’t hate all cops.”
Jamie stilled. He should have been focusing on the details she’d given him that would confirm her story. There could only be so many Michael Clines serving time on drug charges in Illinois state prison, after all. And only so many divorce records for Michael Cline and Sarah Cline. But all he could see were Sarah’s fine-boned hands on the table...clasped between both of his. She was staring at their hands, as well, her eyes wide.
When during her story had he forgotten his control and reached out to her again? Jamie couldn’t decide which shocked him more, that he was touching her or that she hadn’t pulled away.
He held his breath, waiting for her to do just that, then the temptation became too much, and he traced his thumb over the back of her ha
nd. Her skin was as satiny as he’d imagined, more so, though her palms were probably callused from her long days on the job. Her eyes were darker now under the soft yellow light, the rings of her irises almost violet.
He would have stayed there forever, time dangling in a perpetual and voluntary pause. His heart squeezed when only a few seconds later Sarah slid her hands from his.
But even with her retreat, Jamie sensed that something in the room had changed. The air felt thinner. Warmer. More intimate. They’d spent a whole private hour together, with Aiden clear in the next room, but now was the first time it seemed like just the two of them. Man and woman. Alone.
Jamie would have sworn he was the only one who felt it, but the way she crossed and uncrossed her arms made him wonder.
“I guess it’s getting late.” She pushed back from the table and started toward the door.
Reluctantly, he stood, slid his chair in and followed her. “You’re right. I’d better get going.”
He collected his jacket and crossed to where she already stood with her hand on the doorknob. The gesture was mostly for show, anyway, since she couldn’t open the door without undoing all the locks first. Although she faced him, she wouldn’t look him in the eye.
“Thanks again. For everything. Aiden had a wonderful time.”
“I’m glad.
“I did, too.”
“Then it was a perfect day.”
And it had been. Especially since Sarah had finally opened to him and shared her secrets. All of them? His natural inclination toward skepticism that had been honed on the job tried to pop its head out again. He wanted to believe that she had told him everything, and yet he of all people knew how deeply secrets could be locked inside and how difficult it was to trust anyone else with that key.
“Thank you for listening to my story and for sharing yours,” he said. “Thanks for trusting me with it. And there’s one more thing I’d like to tell you.”
He waited, both for her nod of agreement and his courage to say the words in case she never gave him another chance.
“You deserve so much more than life has given you. You should have someone who believes in you, listens to you, cherishes you and trusts you completely.” He took a breath as he wondered whether even he could fulfill the trust part of that calling, when he still planned to check out her story.