Love runs free

Meredith Bennet lives for two people—her husband, Max, and their young son, Caleb. She also lives in fear of her abusive ex-husband, Steve, a man she’s been running from for years. She thought she’d finally eluded him. But when it becomes apparent that he’s found her, she makes a drastic decision. She goes on the run again—by herself—to protect the two people she loves most.

Meredith finds solace and safety in a new identity at The Lemonade Stand, a unique women’s shelter. With Steve on the hunt for her and Max desperate to get his wife back, she will discover if love really is stronger than evil.

“Meredith’s ex-husband was a fiend,” Max said softly.

He spoke as though two-year-old Caleb might hear and understand what Max was saying.

“He brutalized her,” Max went on. “And got away with it because of the power his position gave him. I gather he had a pretty impressive record with the Las Vegas police. I know he was older than her. Her family—both parents and a brother—were killed in a car accident when Meri was a kid. She was alone in the world. She married him at eighteen, and the first time he hit her was less than a year later. She stayed with him nine years.”

He would’ve felt disloyal telling Meri’s secrets if Chantel had been just a friend. But she was a cop. And would help him find Meri.

“It took Steve less than three months to track her down the first time she left. He was still a Las Vegas detective back then. She got away almost immediately and managed to elude him for about a year that second time.”

“This guy’s determined.” Chantel sounded serious. All cop. And Max took his first easy breath in more than twenty-four hours.

Hold on, Meri.

Help is on the way.

Dear Reader,

Sometimes circumstances trap us in situations that defy logical solutions. The “right” things have all been tried. They’ve all failed. And the human spirit—hope—suffers.

But, always, there is a force that’s stronger than logic. Stronger than anything the human mind can conjure up. That force resides in the human spirit; it’s there, waiting to spring into action. All it needs is for us to let it go—to set it free to work.

And, always, one of the hardest things to do is give in to the intangible, the often illogical something inside us—to trust it and follow its dictates. Sometimes we lose hope and settle for a situation that isn’t ideal.

Sometimes, though, trusting that far-too-quiet inner voice is the only way we’ll survive.

Husband by Choice is the story of one such situation. And the woman who thought herself weak, but who’s actually strong enough to listen to her heart, to act on the instinct inside her even though it drives her straight into danger. This story is fiction. I don’t recommend that any woman face violence on her own. I do, however, fully embrace every woman’s right to live by her heart. To fight for that right. And to know ultimate joy.

May we all be a part of the sisterhood shared by the special women who come and go at The Lemonade Stand!

I love to hear from my readers. Please connect with me on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram, visit me at www.tarataylorquinn.com or write to staff@tarataylorquinn.com.

Tara Taylor Quinn

Husband by Choice

Tara Taylor Quinn

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

With sixty-eight original novels, published in more than twenty languages, TARA TAYLOR QUINN is a USA TODAY bestselling author. She is a winner of the 2008 National Reader’s Choice Award, four-time finalist for an RWA RITA® Award, a finalist for the Reviewer’s Choice Award, the Bookseller’s Best Award and the Holt Medallion, and appears regularly on Amazon bestseller lists. Tara Taylor Quinn is a past president of Romance Writers of America and served for eight years on its board of directors. She is in demand as a public speaker and has appeared on television and radio shows across the country, including CBS Sunday Morning. Tara is a spokesperson for the National Domestic Violence Hotline, and she and her husband, Tim, sponsor an annual in-line skating race in Phoenix to benefit the fight against domestic violence.

When she’s not at home in Arizona with Tim and their canine owners, Jerry Lee and Taylor Marie, or fulfilling speaking engagements, Tara spends her time traveling and in-line skating.

For Adam. I pray that you are, now and forever, my daughter’s “Max.”

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Dear Reader

Title Page

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Extract

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

“SHA SHA, MAMA. Sha sha! Geen, Go! Geen, Go!”

Easing her foot slowly off the brake as the traffic signal turned from red to green, Meredith Smith Bennet tuned out Caleb’s chatter because she had to.

And took comfort from it at the same time. The blond-haired toddler, strapped into his car seat behind her, kicked his feet repeatedly with glee. Sha sha—French fries. That was all it took for him to be happy. The anticipation of a French fry.

With a glance in the rearview mirror, keeping the small green car four vehicles back in the other lane in sight, she turned left at the familiar Santa Raquel corner.

“Sha sha, Mama! Sha sha!”

She’d promised Caleb French fries at his favorite fast food place—a treat on the one day a week he had to spend an afternoon at day care—and he’d had his eye on the Golden Arches where they’d been heading before she’d been forced to turn off the main drag.

“Sha shaaaaa!”

Instead of excitement, she heard the beginning of tears in his voice as the arches disappeared from view. The green car had made an illegal right turn, cutting off another vehicle to cross over two lanes.

“I know, Caleb,” she said. Her son was not going to suffer. Or know fear. Not by her hand. “In a minute,” she said, keeping her voice light and cheerful—her husband’s description of her “mommy” voice. A voice he was certain he’d never tire of hearing.

But he’d also been certain that Steve was in the past.

“Mama’s going a different way,” she continued, changing lanes without a signal and making a quick left turn the second she saw the chance.

As luck would have it, she was able to cross three lanes and make a right and then another left turn before the not new, not old, not big and not particularly small green car with the black-haired man behind the wheel could follow.

She’d lost him.

For now.

* * *

PEDIATRICIAN MAX BENNET was finishing up his afternoon’s charting, listening to the chatter of the front office staff in the clinic he shared with several other family physicians. His private cell phone buzzed at his hip.

Last he’d spoken to his wife, she’d been leaving to take Caleb for French fries on his way to day care. But Meri knew his last patient, a four-year-old needing a well-check, had been at three. She probably needed him to stop for milk on the way home. Or vanilla wafers. Caleb was addicted to them. And since they were the only sweets the little guy was allowed....

The caller wasn’t his wife of three years. It was Caleb’s day care.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Dr. Bennet, but Mrs. Bennet isn’t here yet and Caleb’s not happy. He’s been upset since she dropped him off, but it’s gotten steadily worse. He’s crying so hard he just threw up.”

He and Meredith had disagreed on the whole day care thing. He’d thought it was important that Max be integrated. She’d wanted to keep the toddler with her or a private sitter.

She was paranoid about safety. With good reason.

But Caleb had grown too attached to them—the separation anxiety he was experiencing was, in part, their fault.

They couldn’t let Meri’s fears paralyze their son.

“It’s three-forty-five,” he said, glancing at the clock on his wall—a Seth Thomas he and Meri had purchased together at a little shop in Carmel. “What time did she say she’d be back?”

“Technically she’s not due until four but when he was so upset at her leaving, she said she’d be back by three.”

It got earlier every week. “What time did she drop him off?”

“One.”

They’d gone from one full day a week to one half day. And now it was down to two hours?

Still, it wasn’t like Meri to be late collecting their son. Ever.

“Mrs. Bennet had a client this afternoon,” he told the woman on the phone. “I suspect she ran over. I’ll be done here in another fifteen minutes or so and will stop by there on my way home. If she shows up in the meantime, have her wait for me, will you?”

They’d have to talk about increasing Caleb’s time at day care again. Later. Maybe over a glass of wine. When Meri was relaxed.

“Yes, sir. What do you want me to do with him in the meantime?”

“Tell him to go play,” Max said. He supposed he sounded harsh. But his son had to learn to cope away from his mother’s watchful eye.

At two years of age, Caleb was showing no signs of asserting his own independence.

Clicking to end his call, Max dropped his phone to his desk. And closed the file on his laptop. He wasn’t going to get any more work done. Might as well pack up and get Caleb.

But first, he put in a call to his wife. She wouldn’t answer if she was still in session with the little boy who had Down syndrome. His parents had hired her for private therapy one day a week in addition to the speech pathology work she did with him at the elementary school where she worked part-time.

Not surprised when she didn’t pick up—if she was out of session, she’d be getting Caleb—he put his cell phone in the breast pocket of his lab coat and headed out to the minivan he’d purchased when they’d found out they were expecting Caleb.

He pretended that he was as relaxed as he knew he should be. Meri was fine. There was nothing to worry about.

Trouble was he’d told himself that once before—in another lifetime. About another woman. His first wife.

And he’d been wrong.

She hadn’t been fine at all.

She’d been dead.

* * *

WAVING GOODBYE TO DEVON, who stood with his mother in the doorway to their home, Meredith hurried to her white minivan, a much less posh version of the one Max drove—her choice because she didn’t like to stand out or attract attention. With the remote entry device in the palm of her hand, her finger poised over the panic button, she waited until she was in front of the car, with a view of both sides of the vehicle, ensuring there was no one there waiting to jump in one door as she climbed in the other, and then, pushed the unlock button.

Ten seconds later she was safely inside with the doors locked. Mrs. Wright, Devon’s mother, was just closing their front door.

Adjusting her rearview mirror, she stole a panoramic glance of the road behind her. No green vehicles. No vehicles in the street at all.

And no one sitting in a car in a driveway that she could see.

No one loitering in the yards or on the sidewalks or the street.

Nothing suspicious looking at all.

Unless the absence of human life outside was suspicious....

Starting the van, she slowly pulled away from the curb. She was late. She’d told the day care she’d be there to pick Caleb up at three. But technically, based on the agreement she’d made with Max, she was supposed to leave Caleb at Let’s Pal Around until four.

She’d told her husband she’d try to leave him that long but hadn’t expected to succeed. Today, thanks to the new at-home client and the many questions his mother had asked, she just might make it. She just might manage to leave Caleb at day care for the full three hours.

The important thing to do right then was act as if everything was normal. Get Caleb. Go home. Have a normal evening.

And find a way to disappear. Before Max figured out that something was wrong and called in his cop friends to save the day and put himself and Caleb in danger in the process. Before Steve got tired of the little cat-and-mouse game he was playing—had possibly been playing for days if he was the one who’d left that note on her van three days before.

A note with no signature and no number, only a demand to call. She’d tried to convince herself it was a mistake, that it had been meant for some other vehicle. She’d heard Max’s calm voice in her mind, telling her that the past was just that, the past. That Steve hadn’t been around in years and she was letting him win by living in fear.

Keeping a watch behind her as she entered the main thoroughfare on the outskirts of Santa Raquel, Meredith made a mental plan of the route she would take back to her son. A route that wove in and out of various neighborhoods, seemingly going nowhere fast, until she could be certain that no one was following her.

Her rendition of Max’s voice in her head had been telling her to calm down. To stop worrying. To smile.

She’d tried to smile.

And had seen that car following her that afternoon. She couldn’t pretend any longer. The note, this car—they added up to only one thing. Steve knew where she lived. He knew her routine.

Caleb had had a particularly hard time being left at day care. Her sweet little man had probably picked up on her tension. It had gone against every maternal instinct she had to leave him there today.

And yet, she had been grateful to turn him over and walk out that door. He’d be safe there.

Safer than he’d be anywhere with her?

There was a green car behind her. Two cars back. It had been behind her since she’d turned out of Devon’s neighborhood. Staying back in traffic. Not always in the same lane. But there.

The same green car that had been following her earlier. It was a message to say that he was on to her. That if she was driving he knew. That she belonged to him. Was a part of him. Would always be a part of him. They were both parts of the same body. The same soul.

She knew the words. Could hear his voice in her head, too. Louder than Max’s.

Just as she heard her own—telling her to get as far from Caleb’s day care as she could. As quickly as she could.

Her plan wasn’t fully formed yet. She wasn’t ready.

But her time was up.

* * *

HIS JOB WAS not to panic. When he’d married Meredith Smith, alias Cassandra White, alias Lori Wade, alias Pamela Casey, he’d promised not only to love and to cherish, to be faithful and kind until death did them part, but he’d promised to be the keeper of their calm. The one in charge of making certain that fear didn’t rule their lives.

He’d promised her he could live with a woman whose life could possibly someday be in danger.

And in the three years since they’d made those vows, he’d been able to keep every single one of them.

But unlike Jill, the cop who’d made him a widower four years after they’d married, and who’d driven him crazy with worry countless days and nights before that, Meredith’s entire life revolved around keeping herself and her loved ones safe. Not putting herself in danger to keep the world safe.

Jill’s job, and her penchant for leaping into the middle of any situation if she thought she could help, had made living without fear impossible.

Meredith made keeping fear under wraps easy.

The woman was a walking safety course in action.

So she was a few minutes late. Today had been her first private session with Devon Wright, the eight-year-old with Down syndrome. She’d been working with him for more than a year through his school. The at-home session had probably run longer than she’d expected. And that was all.

He could hear Caleb’s cries as he entered the deserted front lobby of the Let’s Pal Around day care, chosen because of its proximity to the elementary school, their home, and his clinic, as well as its distance from the beach. And because of the superior instructors as well, but he wasn’t kidding himself. As soon as Meri had seen the security systems in place at Let’s Pal Around, he’d known she’d made her choice.

“Dr. Bennet,” Alice something-or-other, looking slightly harried with her graying hair falling out of the twist on the back of her head, and a bit of something white spilled on the front of her shirt, greeted him when he walked through the door. “Caleb will be very glad to see you.”

A sentiment, no doubt shared by the Let’s Pal Around staff.

“No word from my wife?” Why was he asking? Clearly, if Meri were there, he’d see her.

“No, sir.” Alice swiped a card and disappeared behind the half door leading to the children he could hear, but not see. The top half of the door closed and latched as well, but remained open during business hours. He knew from his tour that there was another door, a locked security screen door, behind which the children played.

Hands in his pockets, he rocked back and forth on his tennis shoes and told himself there was nothing to worry about. Meri was fine. He was not going to check his watch.

When Meri hadn’t answered her phone, he’d left a message. And sent her a text, too. She’d be in touch as soon as she finished with Devon.

In the meantime, he’d take Caleb home and start dinner. They’d moved chicken from the freezer to the refrigerator that morning. Talked about doing it on the grill with some of the fresh corn on the cob they’d picked up at an outdoor market that weekend. Maybe he’d best put the poultry back in the freezer. Might be too late to grill outside by the time she got home.

They could eat one of the ready-to-go meals in the freezer.

Meredith wasn’t even an hour late yet. And she’d warned him that today’s session might take longer than usual since she’d never been to Devon’s home and would need to prepare the working environment once she saw what she had to work with.

Turning, he couldn’t help but see the little analog clock on the screen of the computer by the receptionist’s window. See, it was only four o’clock...four-oh-one.

Meredith was officially late.

But he wasn’t going to worry.

His job was too stave off the paranoia that threatened their well-being.

Meredith was a speech pathologist. Not a cop. And her past, while dangerous to her at the time, was no longer a threat.

They’d had four peaceful years together, including the year they’d met and dated.

Meri was fine. And had even managed to leave Caleb at the day care for their agreed upon duration.

He should be celebrating.

At the very least, he was going to keep his fears in check.

Their happy life together depended upon his doing so.

CHAPTER TWO

STEVE WAS GETTING SLOPPY. She’d managed to give him the slip two times in one day. With shaking hands, Meredith gripped the steering wheel, gritting her teeth as her sweaty palms slipped on the smooth leather.

More likely he was playing with her. Taunting her. Letting her know he had her on his hook and could pull her in at any time.

She couldn’t go home. She’d lost Steve again, for the moment, but he was moving in on her. As long as she stayed away, Max and Caleb would be safe. Steve didn’t want them. He wanted her.

As far as her ex-husband was concerned, Max and any child she’d borne him didn’t exist because the marriage didn’t exist. It couldn’t when she was still married to him.

He’d refused her pleas for divorce. Hadn’t signed the papers when they’d been sent to him. The judge had finally granted the divorce, signing it into law without Steve’s agreement, after Steve had failed to show up for court.

In Steve’s world, if he didn’t acknowledge it, it didn’t exist.

It was simple, really, if you could accept his version of reality and breathe at the same time.

But she knew him. He’d have shown up for court and fought the divorce if he hadn’t been afraid she’d expose his abuse of her. She’d finally found the strength to fight him—to file for divorce—he couldn’t be sure what else she might do. He’d have denied any allegations. And she’d had no physical proof. But the perfect Las Vegas detective hadn’t wanted the hint of scandal on his record.

She had to get off the road. He could be around any corner. Probably had some kind of GPS device planted on her van.

Which was fine. She had that much of her plan ready. She’d always worried that this might happen, and much as she’d tried to dismiss the note left on her vehicle the other day, it had ignited her fears.

She’d lead him out of town. Ditch the van. And her cell phone, just in case. Just because he was no longer a member of the Las Vegas police force, didn’t mean he’d divested himself of all his tracking devices.

Or the knowledge he’d gained during his ten years as a cop.

He’d know where to find illegal means of keeping tabs on her.

Clearly.

And he wouldn’t hesitate to use them. He lived by the “law according to Steve.” Neither the divorce, nor the restraining order she’d been granted against him in the state of Arizona—and reinstated in the state of California—had fazed him.

Eight years, four states, and four aliases hadn’t stopped him from finding her.

Nothing would.

She knew that now.

Just as she knew that she couldn’t run anymore.

There was no point.

* * *

THERE WAS A benefit to being a widower of a cop killed in the line of duty. A single phone call and you had a group of trained men and women at your disposal, offering to help in any way they could.

His “group,” the Las Sendas Police Department just north of San Diego, was smaller than some, but when Max hadn’t heard from Meredith by five o’clock that Wednesday evening, he placed his call. He’d moved from Las Sendas to Santa Raquel shortly after Jill’s death. Was no longer within the jurisdiction of anyone who’d known her. But cops helped cops—and the families of cops. It was a statute written in some kind of cop blood code.

He knew it well. Knew it would serve him.

Because that code—that cops stood up for cops—had gotten his wife killed.

* * *

MAX FED CALEB. He wiped the toddler’s face and hands, and when his son asked for his mama, he assured him she’d be right back. He was calm. Moved with ease around the kitchen. And when he dropped Caleb’s Melmac ABC plate, splattering the remains of Meredith’s pre-made ground beef stew all over the floor and lower cupboards, he carefully cleaned up every drop.

He had a follow-up call from his Las Sendas police contact. And when Caleb cried for a cookie, and Max remembered that they were out of the little vanilla wafers that were the only treat the boy was allowed, he lifted Caleb out of his chair, grabbed his keys, strapped the toddler into his car seat and went to the store.

He wheeled the cart around the store without hurry, going up and down every aisle, aware that Caleb attempted to touch things he couldn’t reach, and focused on the displays in the aisles and the wares on the shelves. Considering them all with utmost concentration so that he didn’t miss something else they might need, or were out of.

Meredith had been missing for a couple of hours. She’d left Devon’s house late. He’d had confirmation on that point. But she should have been at the day care by the time Max had arrived.

There’d been no reported accidents anywhere in the area involving her. She wasn’t in a hospital emergency room.

And they didn’t need toilet paper. He’d had to replace the roll before dinner and there’d been a twelve-pack in the closet.

Ditto on the paper towels. He’d used half a roll on stew cleanup. And had found a bulk pack in the pantry.

Meredith was a firm believer in being prepared.

Tissue, he couldn’t remember. He hadn’t used any. But if Caleb’s nose started to run, he’d need a lot of them. Certain that Meri had extra tissue at home, too, he threw in an extra three-pack anyway. It didn’t spoil. They’d use it eventually.

Better safe than sorry.

Wherever Meri was, it probably wasn’t good. She’d have called or texted if she could and since she hadn’t....

She’d put on her stiff-chin face, get through it, and fall apart when she got home. She’d deal with whatever challenge she was facing with enough strength to move mountains. And be too weak to climb the stairs when it was all over.

In the safety and security of his arms she’d tell him what had held her up. Like the time she’d passed an old woman waiting at a bus stop and given her a ride. Or the time she’d helped a friend get a deadbeat ex-son-in-law out of her home. She’d survive. And then she might fall apart, depending on the situation.

The tears, when they came, could last a while.

Tissues were good.

Still, in both of those instances, and various others, she’d always called or texted him. Meri didn’t want him to worry. Because he had a past, too.

“Mama!”

With a force that hurt his neck, Max swung around in the paper product aisle, expecting to see Meredith walking toward them. But he and Caleb were the only ones there.

“Mama!” Caleb said again, kicking his feet against the grocery cart.

The boy was staring at Max. Obviously expecting him to produce.

“Mama’s busy, son, I told you that, remember? She’s helping someone and she’ll be back very soon.” He didn’t lie to Caleb. And the words calmed him as much as they appeared to calm the boy.

Meri didn’t risk her life. Or the safety of her family. It was the golden rule by which she lived.

So different from Jill’s call to serve—with a gun at her side, a Taser and a club hooked on her belt and a knife strapped to her ankle.

But like Jill, Meri had enough compassion to fill an ocean. And couldn’t bear to let someone suffer.

Opening the box of vanilla cookies, he gave one to Caleb, and pushed on, navigating his cart through aisle after aisle.

He would not let Meri’s panic infuse him. It was the golden rule by which he lived. He’d promised her he’d be the keeper of her panic. His job was to make certain that old fears didn’t live in their home, lest fear rob them of the second chance at happiness life had afforded them. Steve Smith, former Vegas police detective and abusive ex-husband, was in her past.

Caleb needed a bath. And it was coming close to bedtime. But he wasn’t leaving the store. Not until his phone rang and he knew that Meredith would be at home waiting for them. Or, at the very least, knew where she was and that she was safe.

Of course she was safe. His phone would ring any minute now.

* * *

CALEB TOOK AN extra-long bath. Happy to splash in the water, poking at bubbles and pushing his plastic boat up the sides of the ceramic tub, he asked for his mother a few times, but then went back to his play.

Max sat on the travertine floor, leaning against the wall, one arm on the side of the tub, ready to grab his son if he slipped or tried to stand. He stared at his tennis shoes—purple high-tops that day—and tried to remain calm.

Purple was a spiritual color according to Meri. She’d told him about color associations and some of that had infiltrated his thoughts, as well. But he’d chosen to wear his purple shoes that day because they were the pair closest to the front of the closet. Not because he’d felt in any need of spiritual protection.

Chantel Harris, Jill’s best friend and fellow police officer, had told him to go home when she’d called and found out he was at the grocery store. Someone needed to be at the house in case Meri returned. Or someone else tried to contact them. He’d given her a list of places Meri frequented, from their dry cleaner and grocery store, to clients’ addresses and schools where she worked. Other than Caleb and him, she didn’t have any close friends.

But there were several people, all women, whom she’d helped out of tight spots during the four years she’d been in Santa Raquel.

Chantel had assured him that local police were checking out every place on his list. As a precaution. Meri was only a few hours late. No one was really alarmed. There wasn’t any need for panic.

But in the four years he’d known her, Max had never known Meri to go anywhere or do anything on the spur of the moment. And she’d never once failed to be where she’d said she’d be without a phone call or text to alert him first.

Chantel was checking into Steve Smith’s last known whereabouts, too. Just to assure Max that he was right not to let Meri’s natural inclination to believe the man would find her someday take over rational thought.

Maybe his shoe laces were too long. They looked like the floppy bunny ears on the wallpaper in exam room four. Not his favorite room.

Caleb splashed.

And Max’s phone rang.

The toddler turned, staring at him as he lifted the device he’d been holding in his hand and glanced at the caller ID. It was almost as if Caleb knew they were waiting.

As if he wanted to know where his mother was as desperately as Max needed to find his wife.

And like Max, was man enough to remain in control while he waited.

Chantel.

“Did you find her?” Watching his son, he kept his tone easy.

“Not exactly.”

Hearts couldn’t actually drop. He was a doctor. He knew how the pumping vessel was attached. And knew what stress could do to it, too.

Chantel’s tone made him want to hang up. To watch his boy play in bubbles and know that tomorrow was another day. That the sun would shine again and....

“They found her van, Max.”

Caleb made a motor sound with his mouth. Seemingly unaware that darkness had descended in their bright and cheery bathroom.

“I can’t do it again.”

“Hold on.”

Of course. That was what he’d do. His fingers gripped the side of the tub, slipped and gripped again, bruising the pads and turning his knuckles white. Pressure stopped the blood flow.

With no blood flow there was no pain.

Was there blood in the van? Jill had bled out on the street. And the clean-up crew hadn’t been fast enough. A vision of the empty street with a pool of his wife’s ended life—a photo that had been all over the news for days after she’d saved the life of a fellow officer—sprang to mind.

Caleb splashed. Laughed out loud. And looked to him for a response. Max smiled. His lips trembled and his cheeks hurt, but he kept that grin plastered on his face.

“Tell me,” he said into the phone, careful to keep his tone neutral. He’d promised himself he’d never again be at risk of a phone call like this.

He’d promised.

And then he’d met Meri. Safety conscious, paranoid, locked-in-fear Meri. Who’d found the heart and soul in him that he’d thought dead and gone, awoken it. And given him a son.

“There’s no sign of struggle,” Chantel’s voice held a note of sympathy, but not alarm. “The van was parked nine rows down in front of Chloe’s at the Sun Oaks shopping center.”

An upscale shopping development in the next town over. A maze of stores and parking that covered a square city block.

Meri liked to shop there.

Max’s thoughts calmed. And he rumbled inside. His stomach. His blood pressure. Every nerve on alert.

“Her cell phone was inside,” the thirty-year-old police officer continued. “That’s how they found the van, by tracking her cell. She’d left it on the console.”

Meri’s phone was a lifeline to her—her safety net. One push of a button and she could be connected to law enforcement. To Max. Or to The Lighthouse—a women’s shelter she’d been volunteering at since he’d known her. The shelter she’d lived at when she’d first come to Southern California.

She didn’t go from one room to the next without that cell phone. Wore it in a holster that clipped to any waistband. Showered with it on a shelf she’d had him install above the tile in the stall....

“There was a note, Max.” Another drop in Chantel’s tone. Another splash from the tub. Another rumble inside. “She said that she just couldn’t do it anymore. That she was too worried about Caleb all the time. That she couldn’t even leave him at day care for an afternoon, so how would she ever cope when he went to school? She was afraid that her paranoia would rub off on him. She said she had to go before he was old enough to remember and be traumatized. She left the phone because it was in your name.”

She’d have told him if she was leaving him. She would never have left Caleb. It didn’t make sense. He wasn’t going to panic.

“Were the keys in the car?” If she was ever in trouble and had to run—if she ever thought Steve was after her—she’d leave the car parked with the keys under the driver’s seat. It was one of the many precepts she’d laid out when she’d agreed to marry him.

Precautions, she’d called them.

They had to be prepared, she’d said.

“They were in the closed cup holder. Just like she said they’d be in the note.”

Who left a note in a car telling whoever looked that the keys were in the cup holder?

He sank down a little farther against the tub. She’d very clearly told him she’d leave them under the driver’s seat.

“She left you, Max. I’m so sorry....”

Another rumble. Another splash. And Dr. Max Bennet started to panic.

CHAPTER THREE

JENNA MCDONALD SAT at the white faux antique desk, a diary opened in front of her, and picked up a pen.

DAY ONE.

Pausing, pen suspended over the page, she read what she’d written.

Not her usual handwriting. There was some familiarity to it, but it was too shaky. It would improve. With time.

Everything did.

Until a time came that it didn’t? Did one have warning when that time had come? Did one know?

The wall in front of her was off-white. Her gaze following the color upward, she studied the soft gold-painted wood trim at the top. To remind her that a pot of gold awaited her, she’d been told. Different rooms had different messages. She’d chosen the pot-of-gold room. Jenna liked gold.

Something good to know. To hang on to.

Turning, she took in the generously sized room. Off-white metal furniture, including a queen-size bed, nightstand, and two dressers, fit with room to spare. The floor was carpeted, a light plush beige.

Nice. Peaceful.

The adjoining bathroom had a granite vanity, extra deep tub and walk-in shower. All donations, she’d been told. And lovely.

The closet was small. But too big for the couple of outfits hanging there—chosen from the impressive collection on-site—more donations. They’d told her to take as many as she’d like or thought she could use.

Taking things one day at a time suited her best. Until she figured out what was to come.

It had been said that clothing choice spoke of personality. Jenna’s personality wasn’t clear to her yet.

Somewhere in the folder of paperwork she’d amassed over the previous couple of hours, there was a coupon for a makeover, too, if she wanted one. Though her lack of need for one had been stressed ten-fold, lest she think she wasn’t good enough just as she was.

Lovely surroundings. And the price of admittance was higher than money could ever pay.

With a sigh, Jenna turned back to the diary she’d found still wrapped in its package, along with a new pen in the drawer of the desk at which she sat.

DAY ONE. She read again.

She might do the makeover. Just for the fun of it. Having someone fuss over her might be nice. As long as she didn’t get used to it.

Jenna McDonald was going to live an independent life.

At least she wasn’t financially dependent. She’d grabbed the few hundred dollars she’d had hidden behind the glove box closure. And always kept a few hundred hidden in her purse, too. She had her checkbook for the personal account Max had insisted she have, just so she’d feel safe. There was enough money in there for her to be fine for a while—not that she wanted to use it. The checking account could be traced....

She glanced at the diary. It was something she had to deal with. The woman who appeared on that page.

DAY ONE. Jenna touched the pen to the page.

I’m bereft. So much so it hurts to draw breath. The pen faltered as her fingers grew weak. She paused. Read the written words. And resumed writing.

The future looms before me. Frightening. I feel today that my life will be short. I won’t grow to be an old woman. I won’t live another year.

I want to live. I want to be the wife and mother I tried to be. More than anything.

Pen clutched in her sweaty grasp, Jenna gritted her teeth, closed her eyes. And breathed. She was fine. She’d been here before. Oh, not the room, here. Or even the building here. But she’d been at this point.

And being here again...this she could do.

Opening her eyes, she picked up the pen again. She couldn’t turn her back on the woman on the page.

How does a woman leave the man who is her whole world? Who cherishes her and loves her as much as she loves him? How does she leave a good man?

And how does she leave her baby?

Jenna’s pen flew across the page so quickly now her hand cramped up.

How did her heart continue to beat? Her blood to flow and her stomach to feel hunger pangs?

How could it be that she’d woken that morning as one woman and would go to bed that night a totally different person? Not just a woman with a different name, but a woman who was irrevocably, permanently changed?

But I did the right thing. The only thing. I am putting action to the greatest gift life has to offer. The gift of love. I, of all people, know the value of unconditional love. I was given a chance to know it in its truest sense. And now I must honor that love by loving selflessly back.

I can live the rest of my life, however long or short, knowing that I loved my men enough to put their well-being before my own. I can leave this world in peace knowing that.

Peace. I need it. For them, first. And for me, too.

The pen paused and eyes closed, Jenna tried to clear the mind that raged inside of her. The mind of a woman who’d been so many people. In so many places.

I am absolutely certain that I am not going to run again. I don’t know yet how I’m going to do what I’m going to do, but I am in a place where I will be safe while I figure out exactly how I am going to stand up to the man who’s determined to keep me down, to hold me locked in an embrace that stifles everything that is good inside of me.

As soon as I have figured out how to beat Steve Smith at his own game, as I know now that that is the only way to beat him, I will present myself for battle. To his death or my own. I must either be free to live with my husband and son, or die fighting for that freedom. There is no other life for me. I am not the same powerless woman he once knew. Love gives me the strength to fight the demon....

Jenna jumped as a knock sounded on her door and quickly closed the diary, sliding it inside the desk drawer without making a sound. She moved just as quietly to the bed, lying down with her back to the door.

“Come in.”

“Jenna?” She recognized the voice. Lila McDaniels had introduced herself earlier that evening as the managing director of The Lemonade Stand—Jenna’s current abode.

“Yes?” Hoping that the older woman would respect her need for solitude and go away, Jenna didn’t turn over.

“We missed you at dinner.”

She’d smiled when they’d rattled off the cafeteria hours. And smiled a second time when Lila and Sara had invited her to join them.

“I had some fruit in my bag,” she said. And still did. Left over from another place and time. It had been meant for another. A little boy. She’d get rid of it before it rotted. Just not that night.

The bed depressed and knowing that she wasn’t going to get her way, which was to be left alone, Jenna rolled over. And welcomed the calm that descended over her as she met the other woman’s gaze.

“You’re sure there’s no one we can contact on your behalf?” Lila asked.

“No, ma’am, but thank you.”

She was an adult. Free to travel from place to place as she chose.

“No one who will be worried about you?”

“No.”

“Someone knows you’re here then?”

“Someone knows I’m gone. No one knows I’m here.” The point was critical.

Lila nodded, a sad smile on her face, looking as if she wanted to say more.

“That’s fine, then,” she said. “Your secrets are safe here.”

“I appreciate that so much.”

“When you’re ready, I hope you’ll talk with one of us, Sara or myself or any of the other counselors. We’re here to help. And anything that’s said within these walls stays here.”

“Thank you.” She’d met Sara. Had liked her. But Jenna could probably facilitate any counseling session these good women had to give. There was nothing they could tell her, in terms of battered-wife recovery, that she didn’t already know.

And sometimes all the knowing in the world, all the protection in the world, wasn’t enough.

Sometimes a woman had to be enough all on her own. No matter the consequences.

“You’re sure you don’t want us to notify the police?”

“No!” She almost sat up at that. And calmed herself. “Please, no,” she said. This point was not negotiable. “It does you no good to do so behind my back, right?” she felt compelled to point out. To reassure herself. “There’s nothing to report if I don’t speak up.”

“That’s correct. But we wouldn’t go behind your back in any case, Jenna. Not unless you were a minor or had a minor with you. In that case, we have no choice but to involve the police.”

She nodded. Understanding. And concentrated on relaxing her muscles. One at a time.

The diary in the desk was bothering her. Burning at the edges of her concentration. She was going to have to hide it. Or have it on her person at all times.

“Do you have my cell phone?” she asked now. Lila had mentioned a prepaid device that she could have if she wanted it.

“I do.” Reaching into the pocket of her suit jacket, she pulled out an old-fashioned looking flip phone.

It would do nicely.

“You can’t text or get email, but you can make calls....”

“That’s fine,” she said, sitting up to take the phone and liking the way she could clutch the thing securely in one hand. “I don’t have anything to text or email to anyone.”

And she wouldn’t send either if she did have something to say. Data could be traced.

She had a phone. An untraceable phone. The air in the room lifted. Being without a phone had not been good for her. Making a mental note to have an extra prepaid cell phone on hand at all times, she waited for Lila to stand and go.

“I know that there’s nothing I can say that will help you trust me, Jenna,” the woman said instead. And frowned. “Very few of our residents trust any of us at first. I understand that. Trust has to be earned....”

And sometimes trust came too late to do any good.

“But you...you’re different.”

Yes, she was. Oh, she’d been a battered wife like everyone else staying in the bungalows at The Lemonade Stand. But the physical beatings she’d taken had been the easiest part. “I get the feeling that you’ve been here,” Lila said, unsettling Jenna with the uncanny resemblance to her own thoughts just minutes before. “I’ve been at The Lemonade Stand since day one and I know I’ve never seen you before.” Lila shook her head. “And yet, I feel as though you know this place. Or one like it.”

Four like it. The shelters had been the only places Steve had never been able to breach. Most often, the general public knew of them, but didn’t know the exact location of the buildings where the women stayed. At The Lemonade Stand they were sprawled across several acres hidden behind a two-block strip of shops also owned and run by the Stand.

Others had had a known home office, with housing buildings situated in various and changing locations around the city in which they were located.

In each shelter, in different cities, she’d become reacquainted with the self she’d been before he’d found her again. She’d found a way to believe once more. To venture out...

Not this time. Her stay at The Lemonade Stand was for one specific purpose only. To have a safe place to formulate her plan. She needed a little time to research the psychology of abuse, to get so deeply inside Steve’s head that she could figure out how best to manipulate him. Undercover work at its best. Ironic that she’d take what she’d learned while living with an abusive detective to finally be free of him. She’d do the necessary research at the on-site library, or from a computer there. Figure out where and how to meet up with him. Practice until she could act in her sleep.

And then, as quietly as she’d arrived, she’d leave this place.

“You can trust me, Jenna.” Lila’s expression was genuine, the compassion Jenna read there wrenching at emotions she couldn’t afford. Or allow. “I...I...just, please, know that no matter what, you can come to me. Any time of the day or night. All rules and regulations aside. Don’t let anyone stop you. Not staff, not security. Not anyone. If you need me, you get to me.”

The speech wasn’t normal. Didn’t resemble any of the other first night welcome talks, or any other talk she’d ever had at any of the other shelters where she’d sought solace.

And Jenna instinctively knew, as she sat there on the bed with the gray-haired woman, that Lila had never said those words before.

Not to anyone.

“Yes, ma’am.” She swallowed. Knew that she needed to rest. Sleep would ease the need to cry.

Lila sat with her for several more minutes. A silent companion. And then without any fuss she stood and left.

Waiting until she heard the door click shut, Jenna slid off the bed, retrieved the diary from the desk, and tucked it into the waistband of the pair of dress slacks she was no longer going to need. Then, without turning off the light or visiting her adjoining private bathroom, she lay back down on the bed, cell phone still held securely in her palm, and went to sleep.

In the morning, things would look different.

In the morning, she’d know the next step to take.

In the morning....

CHAPTER FOUR

MAX PUT HIS son to bed right on time. Routine was important. Keeping Caleb’s boundaries the same would give him a sense of security.

Max needed the toddler asleep so he’d quit asking for his mother.

The boy complied with relative ease. Almost convincing Max that he was overreacting— panicking too soon.

She’d left the keys in the car. Not under the seat, which she’d stipulated would be her sign if she was running from Steve, but in the cup holder. That had to mean something.

He wandered through the rooms of their home. Hearing her laughter at the bottom of the stairs. In the living room it was her assertion that one maroon wall would give the place more life—she’d been right.

Because he’d insisted that Meri would have talked to him if she’d truly wanted out of their marriage, or maybe because she’d felt sorry for him, Chantel had agreed to use her off-duty time to continue looking for Meri, following up on all leads, making calls, attempting to locate Steve Smith who’d left detective work and had fallen off the grid....

The kitchen reverberated with the echo of excitement in his wife’s voice as she rattled off the money she’d saved with her shoppers card and coupons—money that they both provided in excess of their needs.

Eventually he wound up in their bedroom. And turned right around and headed back out again. Caleb was still sleeping in a crib. He wouldn’t be up wandering in the night, looking for his parents to be in their bed. No risk of him finding it empty and being frightened.

The guest bedroom wasn’t finished yet. A bedframe, mattress and bedding. An empty nightstand that Meri had seen at a sale and had to have because it reminded her of her childhood, back before the car accident that had taken her family from her—both parents and her younger brother.

Without turning on the lamp, he sank down onto the edge of the bed. And because it was the most sensible thing to do, he slowly lowered his head to the pillow.

He hadn’t brushed his teeth. Was still wearing scrubs minus the lab coat and purple tennis shoes. But sleep was wise.

Hands behind his head, he closed his eyes. Opened them again. And found himself staring at the ceiling, looking for a pattern in the circle of plaster he could see illuminated from the small night-light in the hall.

Ah, Meri, you didn’t have to do this.

The thought was followed by another that had him sitting straight up in bed. Maybe she’d thought she did have to do it.

Meri was always paranoid, but she knew that and took her overreactions into account before acting on anything.

She’d meant what she said in her note. Clearly he’d believed her, the way he’d been slogging around all evening feeling sorry for himself.

And Caleb.

Feeling lonely as hell and wondering how he was going to live through the loss of another wife.

What a jerk he’d been, thinking about himself, his own heartache, instead of putting Meri’s first.

She’d meant the note, but she wouldn’t have left just because she was feeling paranoid. She’d at least have talked to him first. Looked for other options. She loved them too much to just walk away out of fear that her paranoia would hurt their son in the future. They still had three years before Caleb started school. And there were other options to help her deal with her fears.

Anything could happen between now and then. Which was why she took one step at a time.

A motto she lived by. Had taught him to live by.

And all of that meant there was something else going on.

Swinging his feet to the floor, Max sat on the side of the bed in the dark. Why would she just up and leave? Their mail hadn’t arrived until four—long after she’d left the house. It had still been in the box when he got home.

No unusual calls showed up on her cell phone records—he’d checked their usage online himself.

She hadn’t logged into her email account—all of the messages had still been on the server, unread.

And that left physical confrontation.

There’d been no sign of a struggle.

So she’d gone willingly. To avoid physical harm? To herself or to him and Caleb?

Meri would give her life to protect Max or their son. But they hadn’t been threatened.

Would an abductor have waited for her to write a goodbye letter and leave her keys in the cup holder?

He would if her abductor was a determined ex-husband who would want to make certain that Max knew that she was leaving him of her own accord. Steve could have made her write the note.

But why put the keys in the cup holder instead of under the seat? If Steve didn’t know she’d hidden them, or even if he did, what could it have mattered to him whether they were in a cup holder or under a seat?

No one but he and Meri knew about the hiding place.

Which was why they’d had the predetermined keys-under-the-seat agreement. An overkill safety measure agreement, in his opinion, but one Meri had insisted on having so that they’d have a way to signal each other if the other was being taken against their will.

Leave the keys under the driver’s seat if you needed help.

She’d left her keys in the cup holder. She hadn’t taken them with her, or disposed of them, so he could imagine that she’d been unable to leave them. They’d been in the cup holder. Where she’d deliberately left them. Not under the seat.

Her message to him was clear.

She didn’t need his help.

The Meri he knew would never have left such a message.

It had to be Steve. He’d found her and she’d reverted back to the terrified woman who did as he demanded so he didn’t beat her senseless. The woman who believed that the former detective, with all of his underground contacts, was more powerful than the laws that were there to protect her. Who believed, deep down, that she’d never be free of him.

She hadn’t wanted to talk about Steve. Seeing how much it upset her—and honestly believing, after years of no sign of the ex-cop, that he posed them no danger—he hadn’t pushed her for more information.

Lying there in the dark, Max feared that in not doing so, he might have made one of the biggest mistakes of his life.

* * *

DAY TWO.

Sometimes the part of me that takes on different names scares me. She’s so capable, but like an automaton. She goes through the day, doing what is expected of her, even watching for and trying to help others when opportunity or necessity presents itself.

She adapts to the situation in spite of her own needs.

And she doesn’t cry. Ever. It’s as if she can’t and that worries me. She is me and if I’m reaching the point where I can turn off so completely, I fear that my heart is really and truly dying.

Pen suspended over the page, Jenna read what she’d written. And shook her head. Sitting at the antique desk in her room just after dinner that Thursday night, she bent over her diary once again.

I just need to trust, like Max tells me so often. Jenna is impressive. She’s the part of me that holds all of my strength. And dispenses it as I need it. Today, she agreed to a group counseling session that I’ll be attending once a day for at least the next week, when all I really wanted to do, when the invitation had been offered, was shake my head and run.

I don’t need any more counseling. But I do need this time here, to mentally prepare myself to get into the psyche of a man with no moral boundaries, and to figure out when and how to meet him to somehow end his reign of terror. And if I must do counseling to keep up appearances, to maintain my cover of an abused woman seeking help, to satisfy those around me that I am getting the help I need, then so be it. After a full day here I am completely committed to my course of action and know from within the deepest chambers of my heart that I am doing what I have to do. Steve’s torment has to stop. And if I can’t find a way to make that happen—legally and for good—then I am willing to die trying.

Because if I don’t, if I live, and don’t live with Steve, Max and Caleb are at risk. Steve knows how much I love them. He knows I’d do anything for them. And he wouldn’t hesitate to use that knowledge as power against me.

Only if Steve is gone, or I am, will Max and Caleb be safe. Unless I go back to Steve. The third possibility isn’t even an option.

I choose death over life with Steve. Better to watch my boys from above (after all, what better place to watch over and protect them?) than to bring Steve’s rage into their physical space. Because I know my Max. He thinks he has all the protection we need in that small police force of his. If I’m with Steve, Max would come charging in to rescue me. And get himself killed...

Jenna’s hand came to a halt as a tear splashed onto the page. Meredith was hurting. Understandably so. And Jenna had to keep a firm hand on those emotions right now. She would be steady on her course. Reach her goal. For Max. And Caleb.

If there was an opportunity to deal with her heart and soul later, then she could cry buckets.

With her emotions once again firmly in check, Jenna glanced at her watch. She’d told Lila that she’d meet with her later that evening. Over a cup of hot tea with milk in the woman’s private on-site suite.

She’d never had hot tea with milk. And she had a sense that Lila didn’t generally invite residents into her private quarters after hours, either.

The upcoming event would consume part of the long evening ahead. But she wasn’t due in the older woman’s suite for another half an hour.

Caleb will have finished his supper by now. I picture him in his booster seat at the table with tomato soup smeared over his chin and the corners of his lips.

I can smell the soup. And see his sweet little face, those precious big brown eyes crinkled almost shut, as he lifts his mouth up to be wiped.

I can’t think about him missing me.

I also can’t picture his father’s identical eyes at the moment.

Maybe in time.

As another tear dripped onto the page, Jenna set down the pen and shut the book.

* * *

MAX HAD JUST deposited his cranky son in his crib Thursday night, turned on the monitor, the night-light, and shut the door when the doorbell rang.

Meri. Heart racing, he descended the stairs two at a time, his black canvas high-tops hardly touching the ground at all, before he realized that if his wife had returned she’d use her key, not ring the bell.

And before the thought slowed his feet, he countered it with the realization that Meri had left her keys in the cup holder of her car. He was supposed to have picked them up at the police station that afternoon but he’d had a late walk-in, a little boy with swollen adenoids and a panicky first-time mother, and the day care had been calling about Caleb’s distress and....

He was pulling open the door before it occurred to him that Meri wouldn’t have left her house key in her car for anyone to find. If someone stole her old van, oh well...but she wouldn’t take a chance on a stranger happening along and getting access to their home.

A woman stood on his front step. Her uniform, the blond hair, caught at his heart and he took a step back before he realized that she wasn’t Jill.

“Chantel,” he said, sounding as surprised as he felt. He wasn’t at his best. Had none of the infamous Bennet bedside manner.

“You look like you were on the losing end of a water fight,” she said, standing on his front porch as though it hadn’t been years since they’d seen each other.

The last time had been....

Jill’s funeral. She’d stood next to him. Squeezed his arm once. And too choked up to speak, had walked off into the sunset.

“Caleb wasn’t happy to take a bath tonight. Kept insisting that Mama do it.”

Her expression didn’t change much, but he was used to reading a female cop’s eyes. The way they’d glisten almost imperceptibly, focus a bit more, when the woman was moved.

“You decided to go with superhero today,” she said, remarking on his black, white and red superhero imprinted scrubs, that were wetter than not at the moment. The shoes matched because Meri liked it when he bothered to find the right color, which he did about half the time.

“You’re a long way from home,” he replied.

“Three hours.” She shrugged. “And I’m here on business.” Holding up her left hand, he recognized Meri’s key ring dangling there.

He snatched the ring. Not wanting anyone to wipe away what was left of Meri on those keys. Resisting the urge to raise them to his lips, he studied them for the couple of seconds it took him to get himself under control. He’d have to go get her van.

He’d gone to work that day because he hadn’t known what else to do. Chantel, people she’d called, were making some follow-up queries, but as far as they were concerned, Meri had left of her own free will.

She’d left a note. There’d been no sign of a struggle.

Didn’t matter that he knew better. Husbands always thought that.

Still, he’d referred most of his patients to another doctor at the clinic that day—a pediatrician in private practice like himself who traded duties with him whenever one or the other of them was sick or going to be gone.

He’d seen a couple of minor cases. And tried to get caught up on his reading. And on a paper he was writing for the pediatric journal, whose editors had sought him out.

“Her house key is missing.”

“It looked like it to the officers here, we just needed your confirmation that a house key had been on there in the first place. I’m guessing she kept it.” Chantel’s tone was soft, filled with a nurturing that he knew she didn’t often express. “It’s further proof that she left of her own accord, Max. An abductor isn’t going to wait for her to take a key off her ring. Just like he wouldn’t wait for her to write a note.”

“Any news on Steve Smith? Surely the man didn’t just disappear into thin air.”

Chantel’s hair bounced around her shoulders as she shook her head. “He’s not coming up in any databases,” she said, leaving Max with the feeling that their attempts to find the man had been cursory—a matter of professional courtesy only.

“Can I come in?”

He was facing another sleepless night. Alone with a panic he’d promised not to feel. He had to get her to understand that Meri was in danger.

“Sure,” he said.

And tried to pretend he didn’t notice when her hand brushed his arm as she passed.

CHAPTER FIVE

ONE OF THE things Meredith Bennet never failed to marvel at in her life with Max was being able to crawl into bed beside him every night. Like magic, she could cuddle up to the warmth of his body, rest her hand atop the springy dark hair on his chest, and sleep without fear.

Without nightmare.

Meredith’s alter ego, Jenna, who’d awoken alone no fewer than four times with cold sweats the night before, was just as happy to be sitting on the antique chintz sofa in Lila’s sitting room, even if it meant giving more of herself than she wanted to give.

If this plan—to put an end to Steve’s presence in her life—was going to work, she had to be flexible. To go with the flow. At least until she’d had enough time to get ready....

And the plan was going to work. One way or another....

She was out of choices. Out of the will to run, to invent yet another life. She’d found the life she was meant to live—the only life she wanted.

She’d found a love that was real and true and as deep as it got and the only way to honor that love, to keep it in its purest form, was to love unconditionally. Selflessly.

There was no way Max would let her confront Steve on her own, and no other way to make the man go away. Max trusted his cop friends. Jenna was dealing with a man who could think like the cops and stay ahead of them at every step.

A man who didn’t respect the jurisdiction of any law but his own.

She knew. She’d seen him in action.

If Max knew that Steve was after her, he’d call the cops and end up getting hurt. Cornered, Steve was the devil himself. He very well might snatch Caleb, hurt an innocent little boy, just to get her to do what he wanted.

Which was why she had to let him know she’d left her family, rather than chance going home again. She’d left her cell phone so he’d find the van, the note she’d left. He’d read that note and think she left Max just like she’d left him. She hoped she was buying time by making him look for her again.

To keep him in the game of finding her.

“Did you go to college?” Lila, sitting in a wing-backed armchair opposite Jenna, asked her. She held her cup of tea with both hands, and looked as though she was settled in for a long chat.

“Yes,” Jenna said. She’d tried the tea. Didn’t like it all that much. The milk made it too heavy. But she’d sip it. Slowly. Because she could tolerate pretty much anything as long as she didn’t focus on it going down.

For now, her cup sat in its delicate china saucer on the walnut claw-footed table beside her.

“What did you study?”

“Various things. How about you, do you have a degree?”

“Yes.”

She’d been at the Stand a little over twenty-four hours and it hadn’t taken her that long to realize that no one knew much about the managing director. After Lila’s visit to her room the night before, she’d done a bit of quiet asking around.

“What did you do before coming to The Lemonade Stand?”

Lila’s gaze was pointed as Jenna’s question lay between them. Jenna expected a prevarication. Just as she wasn’t being completely honest with her. Such a contrast to the day she’d had, sharing lunch with women who told their stories openly. Dams bursting and releasing the hell of terror they’d experienced in one form or another.

“I was a school teacher,” Lila said conversationally.

From school teaching to managing a shelter for battered women?

“Do you miss it?”

“No.”

Because Lila was satisfied with the life she was leading? Fulfilled by it?

Meredith Bennet knew about living a fulfilling life. And so Jenna knew. But that wasn’t for her to dwell on. Not on that or anything else that would take away focus and strength from the task at hand.

She’d been called to Lila’s suite for a chat. So she chatted. “You didn’t like teaching?”

“Yes. I liked it very much. But it was time for a change.”

Lila’s gaze wasn’t piercing anymore. It was...assessing. And warm. In a motherly sort of way.

Jenna took a sip of tea. Admired the rose silk flower arrangement on a side table.

“What about you?” Lila asked. “Do you have a career?”

“I’m a speech pathologist.”

Lila’s brows rose and she asked, “What’s your specialty?”

“Pediatrics.”

“Are you willing to donate some time while you’re here?”

A slippery slope if ever there was one. They wouldn’t find a license for Jenna McDonald. But, if she could have even a small piece of her real life back, just enough to remind her how great it had been, to keep her strong while she prepared to face down the evil spirit in her life....

If she could help others while she was protecting Max and Caleb....

Lila’s stare was intense. It was as if the woman could read her mind. And her mind was the one thing no one got close to unless she invited them in. Max and Caleb were her only guests. Ever.

She’d fought too hard, for too long, regaining control of her mind from Steve, to give it up again.

“I’m willing to help out anyplace I can.” Innocuous words. She’d see where they took her.

“I’m assuming you have certification? A state license to practice?”

“Yes.” Under her married name. The only legal name she’d had since she left Steve Smith seven years before.

“Can I have a copy of it?”

A vision of Devon Wright’s effusive smile as he’d said goodbye to her the day before flashed across her mind. A picture of little Olivia, the three-year-old who was having surgery in another couple of weeks and would need help learning to swallow again. She’d spent six weeks with the little girl already, earning her trust, preparing her....

Jenna had a job to do. Meredith had a life to live.

But she couldn’t live it until Jenna did her job. And only if Jenna was successful....

She’d been at this crossroads before. Three other times. And each and every time she’d given up not only the life, but the goals. The joy. She’d allowed Steve to take away more than just her freedom. He’d taken away vital parts of her....

“Your secrets are safe here.” Lila’s soft tone was like a buzzer in the cacophony rumbling through her mind.

“It’s not my secrets I’m concerned about.”

“You are safe here.”

She wasn’t concerned about herself, either. But knew better than to say so out loud. At least in this atmosphere.

She wasn’t here to recover from domestic violence. She had a mate who treated her with decency and respect. Who was fully a partner and companion.

She’d sought the life she wanted and obtained it, just as she had every right to do. She’d stood up, pressed forward. She’d dared to reach for her dreams.

She’d succeeded.

Steve hadn’t gotten the message.

She’d looked fear in the eye and her ex-husband was looking right back at her.

So she was going to stare him down. And the first one who looked away would lose.

This was it. Her stare down.

She wasn’t turning her back again until Steve was out of her life for good.

Because there was no way in hell Steve’s evil was going to touch Max or Caleb. At least not on a daily basis. Not as a way of life....

“You don’t have to take this journey alone.”

Jenna’s gaze focused outwardly again. Lila was watching her, and judging by her compassionate, almost knowing expression, she’d been doing so for quite some time.

The older woman had asked for her certification. For Meredith Bennet’s certification. And unlike the other personas she’d left behind each time Steve had resurfaced in her life, Meredith was not going to fade away.

Meredith had a husband. And a son. Both of whom she loved more than she loved herself. She couldn’t turn her back on them. Even if she never saw them again.

And that was something else she couldn’t think about. Because in order for them to be safe, Max had to believe that she’d left him. He had to move on. She had to let him.

And if she succeeded? If she lived to see herself free of Steve? Was it right or fair for her to hope that somehow Max would be available to take up where they left off?

“I can show you my certification.” She had a scanned copy on the tablet she kept in her purse. “But if I do so, I put someone I love at risk.”

“How so?”

Something told her Lila was different. More than a counselor. Or a paid helper. More than a crusader for the cause.

And maybe Meredith had grown soft. Maybe Jenna’s skin wasn’t as hard as it needed to be.

“Jenna McDonald is not my real name, but it is the only name anyone here can know me by.”

“And if someone here knows you by your legal name, who would be hurt?”

Jenna couldn’t think of a thing to say.

Lila sipped tea. Jenna wanted out. It was past Caleb’s bedtime.

Not a Lemonade Stand thought.

“Okay.” The older woman’s voice broke the silence again. Broke through the emptiness inside of Jenna. “Block the name out. Show me the certification and I can put you to work immediately. We have a seven-year-old boy whose speech has become practically paralyzed with stutters....”

“You can look up my license number and know who I am.”

“I didn’t say give me a copy, I said show it to me.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

“You want it now?” Jenna reached for her purse.

“Yes.”

She pulled out her tablet. Turned it on.

The certification was legible, but small. Holding the tablet with her thumb over her identifying information, she carried it over to show Lila.

The woman lifted her glasses. Read.

“Thank you.”

Jenna returned the tablet to her purse.

“When you’re ready, you bring me the rest of that and whatever I see there will remain between you and me. You have my word on it.”

“It’s not you, Lila, I just...”

Holding up her hand, Lila stood. “When you’re ready,” she said. “Just remember that I am here. That’s all I ask. When you need me, you do whatever you have to do to find me.” The woman repeated what she’d said the night before.

Jenna nodded, more because it was expected of her than because she could foresee any circumstance where she might do as the woman asked.

“And when you have something to say, there is space, right here, between you and me, to put the truth, no questions asked.”

Emotion rose inside of her, tightening her throat. Jenna picked up her tie-dyed cloth bag and slipped away.

CHAPTER SIX

“DID YOU WORK TODAY?” Max returned to the living room after exchanging wet scrubs for a pair of red basketball shorts and a gray T-shirt with a faded FBI emblem. It was left over from a trip he and Jill had taken to Washington, D.C., a decade before. As he walked in, he found Chantel standing at the mantel over the fireplace, looking at pictures.

Mostly they were of Caleb, taken in the different stages of growing from newborn to two. The center photo was of him and Meri, taken on their wedding day.

In one corner was an old photograph of a much younger Meri with her parents and little brother.

And in the other, Max’s favorite photo of Jill—in a sundress, not a uniform, taken on the day he’d passed his residency. There’d been a party. And she’d been wholly his wife that day. For the entire day.

It had been nice.

“Yeah, I worked and then headed up here as soon as I was off shift,” Chantel said, her back to the photos now as she watched him.

“Shouldn’t you be getting back?”

She’d asked to come in.

“I’m off tomorrow.” She was watching him. Chantel ran her finger along the edge of the frame that held Jill’s photo. “You remember that night?” Chantel asked. She’d been at the party, too. Everyone who’d played a part in their lives had been there.

“Of course I remember.”

“I got drunk and told you I thought you were great.”

Actually what she had said was that no other guy added up to him and if Jill hadn’t snatched him first, she’d have done so. He’d just completed his residency. Had already had an invitation to share a well-established pediatric practice. Everyone was telling him how great he was that night.

“I’ve been embarrassed about that ever since,” Chantel said now, while Max felt the computer in the other room drawing him.

Meri was “out there” somewhere. Facing a second night without him. As he faced a second night without her. Their first two nights apart since they got married. Even the night she’d had Caleb, they’d been together. She’d spent the night in the hospital and he’d stayed with her.

“I didn’t want you to think that I was coming on to you while you were married to my best friend,” Chantel said, turning back to face him, her hands on her hips.

She was a pretty woman. Slender. Blonde. Brown eyes. A little tall for his tastes. A little hard around the edges. But still, damned attractive. Especially when she smiled. And let her hair down out of its ponytail as it was now.

She wasn’t smiling though. “I loved Jill,” she said. “I would never have done anything to hurt her.”

“I know that.”

“She was such a fool, you know?”

No, he didn’t know. Jill had been larger than life. A true warrior. Everyone thought she was amazing.

And the way her life had ended, saving the life of a fellow officer, she’d died as she’d lived—a heroine.

“She didn’t get what she had in you,” Chantel said now. “If I’d been lucky enough to find a guy as great as you, I’d damn sure have thought twice about strapping on the gun and going out to fight crime.”

“It’s what she was born to do. Why should she be less than herself just because she was married?”

Okay, so maybe he’d have liked it a hell of a lot better if Jill could have been happy with a desk job. Making detective and tracking criminals with a little bit of distance. Or teaching at the academy.

But it hadn’t been what she’d wanted. Wouldn’t have made her happy....

“You could have had any number of great guys,” he said now, remembering the flock of admirers that always seemed to be trailing behind the attractive cop.

“I guess.”

“You seeing anyone?” he asked. Because he wanted to ask her to take him seriously and help him find Meri’s ex-husband. He was growing more and more certain that Steve was somehow behind this.

“I was seeing someone. A captain of another squad. It didn’t work out.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not. And I didn’t come here to talk about my love life,” she said, moving away from the mantel. “I came to see what I could do to help you,” she said. “I heard the concern in your voice last night, Max. And while, officially, I’m pretty convinced that Meri left of her own accord and is fine, I’m also your friend. I’ve got the next couple of days off, and I wanted to make a personal appearance at the station here, which I did tonight, to talk to the guys and see what I could find out about where Meredith might be. You know...in case you want to talk to her, to maybe patch things up....”

It was a wonderful, selfless thing to do. A friend thing to do.

“I just...you called and asked for help and...it’s what Jill would want me to do, to help you. It’s...she made me promise, the night before you two married, that if anything ever happened to her, and you needed help, I’d be there. I just wanted to, you know, clear the air, first, in case you—” she tipped her head from side to side “—got the wrong idea about that...night.” With her thumb she gestured to the photos behind them.

He might have wondered a time or two about Chantel’s interest in him...but everyone knew that he and Jill had a good marriage. And Chantel was Jill’s very best friend. From grade school. It was understood that he and Chantel would grow to have a genuine fondness for each other. Hell, they’d spent every holiday of his marriage to Jill together.

And hadn’t spoken more than half a dozen times since his first wife’s death.

“You’re fine,” he said now, crossing his arms as he stood there in his bare feet eager to get to the business at hand. “No wrong ideas about that night. So what did you find out?”

“Nothing,” she said. “They aren’t looking for her. They hadn’t yet opened a missing person’s case when her van was spotted and they didn’t need to do so once they found her note. There was nothing suspicious, nothing that warranted expenditure of already limited manpower. Let’s face it, Max, an abductor isn’t going to stand around and wait while she writes a note.”

“He would if he was her ex-husband forcing her to write it.”

“I know. You mentioned that concern last night and in light of the fact that he’s an ex-cop, and that he was abusive to Meredith, I got someone to pull the parking lot surveillance tape where she ditched her van. Meredith was alone, Max. She pulled in. Parked. Sat in the car and wrote the note and then got out. There was no one there, forcing her to do anything.”

“Just because you didn’t see anyone doesn’t mean he wasn’t there.”

“What are you saying?”

“I know my wife. If she was going to leave me, she’d tell me to my face.” Kindly, no less. Meri was not only hot as hell, incredibly sexy, the mother of his child and the love of his life, she was also the nicest person he’d ever known.

“She did leave you.” There was no pity on Chantel’s face. But her concerned expression held more than just a cop’s distanced compassion. “That’s what I’m telling you.”

And he knew differently. Appearances could be deceiving.

“Meredith’s ex-husband was a fiend,” he said softly, as though Caleb might hear and understand what Max was saying. “He brutalized her, not only physically, but mentally, too. And got away with it because of the power his position gave him. I wish I knew more about him, but I gather he had a pretty impressive record with the Las Vegas police. I know he was older than she. Her family, both parents and a brother, were killed in a car accident when Meri was a kid. She was alone in the world. She grew up in a foster home. Met Steve through her foster parents. She married him at eighteen, and the first time he hit her was less than a year later. She stayed with him nine years.”

He’d have felt disloyal, telling Meri’s secrets, if Chantel had been just a friend. But she was a cop. And would help him find Meri.

Chantel and Max had spent four Christmases together. He trusted her. And had told Meri all about her.

“It took Steve less than three months to find her the first time she left. He was still a Las Vegas detective at that time. She got away almost immediately and managed to elude him almost a year that second time.”

Chantel’s eyes narrowed. “And you think this is the third time?”

He shook his head. “The third time was in Arizona. Five years ago.”

“This guy’s determined.” She sounded serious. All cop. And Max took his first easy breath in more than twenty-four hours.

Hold on, Meri.

Help is on the way.

* * *

DAY THREE.

It is night again. Friday night. Carly went to bed two hours ago. I heard Latoya turn off the television in the living room an hour later and then her door shut, too. It’s just the three of us in this bungalow. The three of us and the darkness.

It occurred to me last night that since my folks were killed when I was twelve, I’ve never had a room to myself. Ever. There were foster homes shared with other foster kids. And then there was Steve. And later, the other shelters, they were dorm room–style. As was the one dorm I was in between shelter one and shelter two. Between two and three was a one-room apartment shared with a shelter sister, and between three and four, a two-bedroom apartment shared with four sisters. After four, it was the YWCA. I’d wised up by then. I knew not to room with shelter sisters. Steve always knew how to find me. He might not find the exact shelter house I was in, or if he had, hadn’t been stupid enough to breach them. Much easier to be patient and wait for me to be out on my own. But he’d find the home office instead. And watch it. I’d leave the shelter when I was ready, get an apartment and by then, he’d already know of and be following women who came and went from the home office. By my continued association, he’d eventually find me. Took a lot of time. A lot of tedious waiting and watching.

Apparently I was worth the effort to him.

I actually thought changing my habit, going back to my legal name—something he’d never suspect—moving into a YWCA instead of an apartment—had finally won me my freedom. Or rather, I wanted so badly to believe....

I feel kind of silly writing this down. I know all of this stuff. But if I don’t make it through this attempt to stand up to him rather than run, to face him head on and somehow threaten or trick him into leaving me alone, I’d like to think that my journey might be of some benefit to someone else who is a victim of domestic violence.

Today’s group counseling session got me thinking about that. I guess because there were so many of us who are new here—including my two bungalow mates. Carly—she’s twenty-seven and was abused and then stalked by her boyfriend—has been here for a couple of weeks. Latoya just arrived yesterday. She’s in her forties, escaping her husband of twenty-four years, and I’m pretty sure this is the first time she’s ever sought help. Her youngest just left for college.

Carly’s external bruises have healed. The left side of Latoya’s face is still too swollen for us to know what she really looks like.

In counseling today Sara told us that it’s not just the few of us in shelters who feel so isolated—so cast apart. It’s one in four of those hundreds of women dropping their kids off at school every day, getting their nails done or walking the aisles in the grocery store.

I know this stuff.

And yet, today, I could feel the shock of the facts reverberate all the way through me. It was as though I’d heard them for the first time.

Or rather, I felt them for the first time. And I knew I had to do what I could to help. I will make my life matter. Even if I am at the end of my life.

I will share this, my attempt to fight back, with my sisters. In this diary. And maybe...someday...if Caleb wants to know more about his mama, someone will make these writings available to him.

What a comfort that thought is to me. I am writing to help Caleb understand me someday. To understand the challenge I faced and the choice I made. I am not deserting you, Caleb. I am not walking out on you.

You are not being abandoned! You are so loved, my little man. More than you will probably ever know. I need you to know that if I don’t make it through this, I am okay with that. I will die at peace because I died for you and your daddy. I died protecting you from a fiend I should never have brought into your lives.

I undertake this job with the assurance that if I leave this earthly life, I will be watching over both of you from above. I will always be around, loving you, protecting you. I need you to know that....

Tears dropped onto the pages and Jenna knew she had to stop. But although it was late, she still had many hours of darkness to endure. Her housemates were both in their rooms for the night. And if allowing Meredith to pour out her deepest heart, and some tears along with it, would help her—Jenna—to make it through the days, then so be it.

She was only human.

And so, with eyes blurring the script, she wrote long into the night. Completely sober, yet scribbling drunken-seeming avowals of the undying love she might never be able to express again. She wrote because she couldn’t sleep. She wrote to keep her sanity.

She wrote because she missed her men so much she wasn’t sure that she could stay on top of the pain.

* * *

WHEN MAX GOT home from work Friday night, Chantel was there. She’d spent the night in his home more times than he could count during his marriage to Jill. His and Jill’s spare room had been dubbed Chantel’s room. She’d kept a toothbrush and change of clothes there.

Her staying Thursday night had seemed a bit odd—and yet logical, too. There was no way he was going to send her out to find a hotel in Santa Raquel at midnight and it was even less acceptable to let her drive the three hours back to Las Sendas after spending the evening helping him try to track down Meri’s ex-husband. The guy had spent some time as an undercover cop. If he didn’t want to be found, finding him wasn’t going to be easy.

Chantel was offering him professional expertise on her own time. Because it was what Jill would have wanted.

She’d also cooked dinner for him and Caleb, as Max had discovered when he’d come into the house through the garage, his son on his hip, expecting to find a cold and deserted house, and finding, instead, a casserole in the oven and a plain-clothed cop poring over pages of reports on the laptop computer she’d set up at his kitchen table.

Meri would never have put a computer on the dinner table.

Dining came before business—always. Family before business—always. But now the business was finding Meri.

Which was why, at ten o’clock Friday night, he and Chantel were still sitting at the kitchen table.

She’d used her password-protected account to search crime databases and found seven Steve Smiths in the Las Vegas area who’d been charged with counts of domestic violence during the years Meri would have lived there.

And was trying to connect any of them to the Steve Smith on Meri’s Las Vegas marriage and divorce records.

There were one hundred and twenty Steve Smiths just in the North Las Vegas area.

“None of the seven charged Smiths match up,” she said as soon as he finally got Caleb asleep two hours past his bedtime.

It was the first they’d been able to speak freely since he’d arrived home. Caleb might not understand the significance of words, but he could very well remember them, and he wasn’t going to risk his son being adversely affected. Caleb was already showing signs of anxiety, just having Meri gone, without a bunch of adult-type talk involving police searches confusing him further. It wasn’t so much the words, Max knew, but the serious tone of their voices that would alarm him.

“Two are in jail. One is dead. Three are still married to their spouses and living and working in Las Vegas. And a seventh moved to Massachusetts and is remarried. None of them were cops. Do you have any idea how old Meri’s ex is?”

“Six years older than she, which would make him thirty-eight.”

“None of these guys are thirty-eight.”

Then they weren’t looking in the right place.

“Are you sure she pressed charges against him?”

Was he? He’d assumed she had. But had she actually said so? “She said that turning him in hadn’t helped,” he said, trying to remember her exact words. It wasn’t as though he and Meri sat around and discussed the abusive past that she was trying to leave behind.

She’d been through counseling. And said that her best course was just to move forward. If she ever hoped to have a normal life she had to move on from being a victim.

Or something like that. Those conversations had been more than four years ago. He’d taken away the pertinent facts and left the rest.

Chantel changed screens. Typed.

“I’m looking up restraining orders with any of her names on them.” He’d given her Meri’s aliases the night before. “If she filed something we can make an educated guess that the man she filed it against is Steve.” Chantel’s screen went blank before lists of green writing popped up. “I’m assuming she only had one abuser?”

“That’s correct.” No doubt in his mind about that one. “And she did file a restraining order,” he said, remembering. “More than four years ago.” Steve Smith had been a curse in Meri’s life. And a threat to his life with Meri from the very beginning.

One thing was certain, when they found the guy, he was going to pay.

Even if he wasn’t immediately responsible for Meri’s disappearance, and he hoped to God he wasn’t, he was most definitely peripherally to blame. If not for Steve’s years of abuse and later hunting her down like an animal, Meri wouldn’t suffer from such paralyzing paranoia.

“I’ve got it.” Highlighting a record, Chantel opened it up. Clicked to bring up an official looking document. “It was filed almost five years ago and was granted for one year,” she said slowly, reading. He tried to see by leaning over from where he was sitting, but couldn’t make out the fine print on the PDF form.

“Five years ago he was working as a P.I.”

He hadn’t known that.

“Steve had written to her via the last shelter she’d been in, using her newest assumed name. The letter was the basis for the order....”

He was trying desperately to remember things he’d only wanted to forget.

“Private investigators have to be fingerprinted to get a license to practice in Nevada,” she said. “So I ran a search, matching the Steve Smith named on Meri’s restraining order with a Steve Smith in the fingerprint database under the same address. It came up a positive match.”

“So he was a private investigator.” Not great news, but not the end of the world either. “I’m guessing Meri didn’t think that was nearly as frightening or noteworthy as him having been a cop. It was his police connections that scared her. And he had to do something when he left the force.”

“Do you know why he left?”

“Meri was certain he left so he could pursue her exclusively.”

Frustrated at his lack of knowledge, Max waited while Chantel continued to type and read. Steve Smith had been a ghost in their lives—one who’d left a lot of fear.

“The restraining order was reinstated in California when she moved here. It’s good for five years.”

He’d known it was good in California. He hadn’t known about the reinstatement part.

“Steve was a detective with the Las Vegas police for ten years.”

“I told you he was a cop.”

Chantel continued to read whatever private database she had access to. “I didn’t realize he was this decorated. The man would have contacts, Max. And there are a lot of loyal men on the force....”

He’d heard stories from Jill about how fellow officers overlooked claims of domestic violence against their own, understanding that a bit of aggression came with the territory.

Believing, too, that a man who risked his life every day to save others wouldn’t cross the line and hit a member of his own family.

If there were allegations, the force recommended counseling. They watched over him. Made sure there were support facilities available to him and to the members of his family.

“He retired from the force without a blemish. I find it hard to believe this is the same man that would behave as Meredith told you he had.”

Chantel knew police work. She knew Jill. She didn’t know Meri.

“Talking about Steve upset Meri,” he said with confidence while, inside, he was running scared as hell. “He hadn’t been around since she left Arizona and I was certain he’d moved on. He didn’t follow her to California. Either he got the message to leave her alone, met someone else and let Meri go, or was in jail. Didn’t much matter which it was as long as he stayed out of our lives.

“I assumed Meri didn’t know and didn’t want to know what he was doing. I honestly didn’t think he was still a threat, because of the order and because he’d gone so long without bothering her. In my mind, the problem wasn’t so much his showing up again, as it was the effect his years of abuse had had on her. I tried to play down her past to help her move on.”

“Restraining orders are enforceable in all states. And she could have filed for one in California, had her hearing, without him ever having to attend. He would’ve known that.”

Chantel continued to scroll. And he needed her to understand.

“When I first met Meri she was always looking over her shoulder. Not afraid of her shadow so much as being in constant preparation for a hit from behind. It was as if she didn’t think she was allowed to live a normal life and be happy.”

“Sounds like a woman used to keeping secrets.”

Her words seemed to be a direct threat to his marriage.

“I’m not saying that she’d betray your trust or anything, but that maybe keeping secrets had become a matter of survival to her.”

Chantel’s big brown eyes were filled with compassion.

Max focused on his own computer, where he was searching social networks for Steve Smith. There were lots of them.

Lots of Steve Smiths. Ordinary-looking guys with ordinary families. And jobs.

“I’m just... I guess what I’m trying to say is that someone like this, someone who’s had to hide to this extent...it’s understandable that you might not know her as well as you thought you did. In terms of you being so certain that she wouldn’t leave you.”

Chantel was talking about a woman she didn’t know. Making her sound like someone he didn’t know.

His job was to stay calm.

CHAPTER SEVEN

AT A COMPUTER in a private cubicle at the library in the main building of the Stand on Saturday, Jenna studied various domestic violence websites, reading about the abusive personality, fantasy bonds, dependent relationships. All things she knew about, but only from the victim perspective. She had to get into the mind-set, to imagine the feelings so deeply that she could predict reactions to stimulus. The goal was to figure out what stimulus to use on Steve to get the reaction she needed—him to choose to set her free.

She read statistics and psychological data. On victims. And abusers—who’d often been victims themselves. She read victims’ stories. There was Emma, who’d left an unfaithful husband for a wonderful man, Robert, she’d met online, a man who was a friend to her for a couple of years before she finally divorced her cheating husband and moved in with him, only to end up bruised and broken a couple of years later.

There was Lottie, a teenager abused by her boyfriend. Belinda, who’d suffered abuse since childhood at the hands of her father. The list, the stories, went on and on.

She felt as if she knew each and every one of the women she read about, wanted to give each of them a hug and a promise of emotional support from now through eternity.

Jenna acknowledged the feeling, understood it as a consequence of identifying with them so completely. And she moved on.

She wasn’t here to read about her sisters. She had to know everything she could find out about abusers. Not how to identify them. She knew those lists all too well—could remember the first sickening time she’d been on a website, reading a list, and finding Steve in every single characteristic she read.

But what made a man do what he did? She had to know how to get him where he hurt. To find the humanity in him and appeal to it somehow. Not verbally of course. That would just feed his sense of control—hearing her beg. Experience had taught her that during her first year of marriage.

She read for hours. Unaware of fatigue. Or hunger.

And then she found James.

His mother had died when he was two and he’d been raised by a paternal aunt who had no children of her own. And didn’t want any. She resented her brother, a long-haul truck driver, leaving James with her, but took him in because it was her godly duty to do so.

She went to church on Sunday morning and Sunday night and Wednesday night and took him with her every single time. And for every sound he made that interrupted her spiritual oneness she would burn him with the tip of her cigarette when they got home. Not enough to blister, or leave scars. Just enough to remind him of the dangers of hell’s fires.

The little boy did everything he could to please his aunt and when she took sick while he was in his teens, he kept her home, caring for her with patience and kindness until the day she died. Some thought he’d done so for the money he’d inherit when she was gone. But he’d known they were paupers. He’d cared for her himself because he’d known what kind of state facility she’d have ended up in if he hadn’t kept her home.

She’d opened her home to him. It was his duty to keep her there. God—and his aunt—had taught him well.

Shortly after his aunt died, he met a girl who’d lost her family tragically young. They hit it off from the very beginning because they had in common that sense of not really belonging, of having been denied the core foundation of a stable home life. And they married as soon as she was out of high school.

He was good and patient and kind to his wife, understanding her tender heart. He just did not tolerate any actions from her of which he did not approve. He was boss of the house now. And with that responsibility came the right to make those in his home follow his rules. By whatever means.

He provided. So he got to rule. And sometimes ruling meant that you had to teach those in your care about the dangers of hell’s fires.

He didn’t burn anyone. Remembering the burn-related nightmares of his youth he would never do that. He just used his words, and later his hands, to save his wife from falling down the devil’s hole.

He did so with God’s blessing. Using scripture to manipulate and control. To instill fear. Using hard work and dedication to family as proof of his own good heart.

And...

“Are you okay, dear?” Jenna jumped in her seat at the sound of a voice just over her shoulder.

“Yes!” she said, quickly minimizing the screen. “I’m fine, why?” Still lost in the story she’d been reading, she wasn’t sure if the sixtyish woman was the same one who’d been behind the desk when she came in, if she even worked there at all, or was a resident like herself.

“You were trembling so hard I could feel you,” she said, pointing to an adjoining cubicle perpendicular to the one at which she sat.

The woman had presumably been on a computer as well, and since the computers were reserved for residents, that would make her one.

“I’m sorry,” Jenna said now. “I guess I’m a little cold. They’ve got the air conditioner blowing pretty hard in here.”

It was. But she hadn’t noticed that either, not until then.

“I’m Renee,” the woman said, nodding.

“I’m Jenna.”

“I know. I saw you at dinner last night. You hardly touched a thing.”

“I wasn’t very hungry.”

“You also don’t act like this is your first dance. You aren’t looking lost, or trying to figure out the way things work.”

She shrugged.

“It’s not mine, either.”

If the woman needed to talk, she’d listen. There were others milling around. A woman a few tables over, with an opened encyclopedia and a pad of paper and pen in front of her. Another sitting in an armchair reading a magazine. And someone else reading from a tablet. There were a couple of women huddled together across the room, too.

Women seeking solace through conversation with other women was part of the healing process.

“You’ve been here before?” she asked Renee, as the other woman pulled her chair around and sat down.

“A few years ago. I’d just put my husband of forty years, Gary, in the hospital with a shove that ended up paralyzing him.”

Renee couldn’t have been more than a hundred pounds. “You hurt him?”

“The police said it was self-defense. So actually did Gary when he realized that he could lose me if he lied about it. He’d been about to throw me down the stairs. I shoved against him, purely a terrified reaction on my part, and it caught him off guard at just the right moment and he went down instead.”

It wasn’t a story she’d heard before. She could only imagine the guilt mixed with fear and confusion that one would carry in such a situation. She’d gone through years where she’d believed Steve’s anger was her fault. If she didn’t nag as much, ask so many questions, if she didn’t need so badly to be loved, if she hadn’t pissed him off at just the wrong moment, if she’d been more understanding of the very real pressures of his dangerous job....

Renee shifted and it dawned on her that she wasn’t meeting the woman on the “outside.” Renee was back in a shelter for abused women.

“You said your husband was paralyzed. Was it only temporary, then?”

“No.”

“But he hurt you again?” They were sisters, in a place where secrets were safe.

“No, he didn’t. He went through counseling, and once he saw what he’d been, he was truly sorry. He met with his group every week, long after he’d completed the program, just to make sure he never slipped back. He said that since he hadn’t seen the abusiveness in himself to begin with—you know the lies they tell you, they sometimes believe them, too—he wasn’t going to take a chance on having that happen again. He really did love me....”

Renee’s eyes filled with tears. And Jenna was at a loss. Hearing about an abuser who was also one’s true love wasn’t...something she’d ever been privy to before. Or even considered.

“But...you’re here....”

“Gary died last year, just after Christmas. Our son, Brian, who’d gone through a divorce shortly before his father was hurt, had moved home to help me take care of Gary these last few years. He... It was hard for him, to see his father so helpless....”

Uh-oh. Jenna’s heart lurched.

“...the counseling, he was all for it at first. I mean, he’d known the back of his father’s hand a few dozen times himself. But later...he said the weekly meetings, they turned his dad into a wuss....”

Wanting to stop what was coming so Renee wouldn’t have to relive something she shouldn’t have had to endure the first time, Jenna held herself back with effort.

Renee wouldn’t be talking to her if she didn’t need to do so. And sometimes, worse than having to tell your story when you didn’t want to, was having someone tell you to stop when you did. “Brian’s ex-wife, at the time of the divorce, had claimed that he was too much like his father. Brian said she was crazy, that she was just trying to make his life miserable, to make him pay, because he couldn’t put up with her lying anymore. He’d caught her with another man. We believed him at the time. I knew my son. He’s the assistant pastor of our church....”

Renee stopped and her chin trembled. So did her lips. But her eyes didn’t waver as she looked at Jenna and continued, as softly as before, “The first time he raised a hand to me, I died a bit inside.”

A mother shouldn’t ever have to face such an atrocity. No woman should ever have to face abuse period, most particularly from a trusted loved one, but from your own child? From the human that you grew and bore and raised with unconditional love? Your own flesh and blood?

In the moment, Jenna felt incredibly lucky.

“You’re here because Brian’s been abusing you?”

“That’s right. It’s been... I’ve been here for six weeks, and really, I should be ready to go, but....”

“Are they pressuring you to move on?” Most places had to. With money constraints and regulations that didn’t allow them to house residents long-term; shelters could only do so much.

“No! They don’t do that here. Not unless you aren’t trying to help yourself. But even then, they help find alternate housing. The Stand isn’t funded principally with government money. There’s some, but it’s primarily funded by investments and private donations and a lot of the work is done by volunteers, so they aren’t as tied to generic regulations as most places.”

“So you can stay until you’re ready to go....”

She nodded. “I just... He’s still a pastor at the church where he grew up. At the church where his father and I grew up. I’m just... I...” She glanced at Jenna’s computer screen.

“I was standing behind you for a bit before I called attention to myself. I... You were shaking and seemed upset, but you were engrossed and I... The article you were reading... I...”

Understanding dawned. She’d been reading about the abuser who used religion to keep his victim under his control. “You want to help your son.”

With tears in her eyes, Renee nodded.

“You realize you can’t help him if he’s not willing to help himself.”

“Are you telling yourself the same thing?”

“I’m... My situation is different.” She couldn’t let the other woman assume...she couldn’t be responsible for setting an erroneous example. She was willing to die in this quest. She couldn’t be responsible for another woman doing so. “I’m not trying to help anyone else.” The words finally came to her. “I’m trying to help myself by gaining an understanding of...the other side.”

Renee studied her for a long minute. And then, standing, she nodded.

“Please.” Jenna reached out to her and was surprised when Renee took hold of her hand. “I’ll... We can study together, if you like. We can learn together. I just...promise me one thing....”

“What’s that?”

“That you won’t put yourself in a position that will allow your son to hurt you again.”

“I can promise you that I won’t have false hopes where he, or my ability to help him, is concerned. But he’s my only child, Jenna. I can’t promise never to be alone with him again.”

It wasn’t what she’d asked. But she understood that it was all the other woman could give.

And that made it enough.

For now.

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHANTEL HAD TO leave on Saturday. She was on shift that evening. Max didn’t want her to go. While she was there, working with him, he felt as though he was actively on the way to finding his wife. He was actually doing something to bring her back home to him.

He’d continue his online searching—people were more open on social networks. They showed their true colors. And as Chantel had said, abusers with ego problems could be drawn by a social network’s platform to brag about oneself.

Cops, she’d warned, were less likely to use online social networks, however, because they were so aware of their traceability.

She’d promised to continue investigating from her end, though she was treading carefully until she found out how the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department viewed Steve Smith—as one of their own that they would protect, or as one who’d betrayed them all by making a mockery of the badge.

From what she’d been able to determine so far, it was the former.

“What about that list of contacts I gave you?” he asked her while Caleb sat on the living room floor engrossed in a kids’ show on TV. He and Meri didn’t let the television babysit Caleb. But Meri had walked out on them and now he had to make do the best he could.

Ashamed of the thought he moved a little closer to the front door, while still keeping his young son in sight.

“Dead ends.”

Chantel was doing what she could. So was he.

And so, he was certain, was Meri.

It would all work out. They were going to be fine.

“I’ll stay on this, Max,” she told him. “Between the two of us we’ve spoken with anyone she had contact with recently. I’ll continue making calls.”

“Thank you.” But... “Something made her run.”

“I agree. I’m just not convinced it was the dangerous threat you assume it was. She might just be a runner, Max.” Chantel’s voice was soft. “You married a woman with serious issues. They aren’t her fault. I’m not saying they are. Based on the little bit we’ve been able to put together this weekend— her aloneness in the world, her marriage to an allegedly abusive detective from LVMPD, a man who is now a private investigator and has hunted her down on four different occasions—she couldn’t help but have issues. Some women, when they start to feel emotionally pressured, or to feel as if they’re going to fail, run. It’s their way of avoiding the pain of disappointing those they love.”

He wanted to push her out the door and close it behind her. Permanently. “You’re saying they’re motivated by their fear of retribution to get out before they disappoint,” he guessed, because the rational part of him knew there was some truth to her statement.

Just not with Meri. She’d never be afraid of him.

“Sometimes. Or maybe it’s like she said, leaving Caleb at day care was too much for her. You said that she’d fought you on that issue, that the amount of time she left him each week was getting less and less. And she knew you weren’t going to allow her to get away with it.”

This wasn’t about their son’s day care. He and Meri had talked about that issue. And he gave in to her whenever she was at the point of panic.

Because he really did understand.

Just as she understood that he had a bit of a sensitivity where losing his wife was concerned. She wouldn’t just up and leave him.

“If your relationship was exactly as you say it was, if Meri is all you believe her to be, then why would anything make her run?” The question came quietly, but also with grave seriousness. Chantel, a couple of inches shorter than he was, somehow made it difficult for him to look away. “If she trusts you as much as you think she does, why didn’t she come to you with whatever was bothering her? Why not talk to you about it before she took off?”

“Because Steve wouldn’t let her,” he said, engulfed with tension anew. “It’s what I’ve been telling you for three and a half days. He was there even though you didn’t see him on the tape. He’s got her, Chantel. I’m certain of it. For the reasons you just stated.”

And what if Meri wasn’t running because of fear for her own life? What if another part of the letter she’d written was the truth? The part about protecting Caleb? What if she was somehow protecting her son from Steve Smith?

It didn’t really make sense. She’d call the police if that was case. She knew he had an “in” here, just like Steve used to have in Las Vegas.

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