“I didn’t mean to kill him,” Evan said, still looking at me, his voice low and calm. “It was an accident. But he was hurting you and it had to stop.”
Just that simple. I’d had that same thought a million times a day for the last year: He’s hurting me and it has to stop. And here comes Evan fucking Salinger, in town for less than five hours, and he’d made it stop. Relief flooded through me, and for three glorious seconds, I reveled in my new freedom. And then reality crashed back in.
“No, no, no,” I said, and hurried to the front window, to throw the curtain shut. “You shouldn’t have done this. Why did you do this?”
“He was hurting you…”
“Evan!” I cried. “They will kill you, Lee’s friends. Or prison…They’ll lock you up again…”
“We’re leaving,” Evan said, still so maddeningly calm. “I’m taking you somewhere safe.”
I shook my aching head, pacing well away from Lee’s body that was so still. Not sleeping still, or unconscious still, but dead still.
“There is no place safe,” I said, my thoughts a jumbled mess and bursting out of me in fragments. “Not for me…Sure as hell not for you. I might’ve been able to claim self-defense. I might’ve…But no. You…you fought with him? You beat the shit out of him and then you killed him. Your goddamn DNA is all over everything…”
“Jo.” Evan’s voice was like a balm over a raging burn. “I did it. You’re not going to go to jail for this.” And then a crack in his voice, his jaw twitched and his eyes hardened. “You’re not going to pay for this, not after what he’s done to you. No. I did this. I’ll pay for it. But not yet. Right now, we have to get you out of here.”
Get me out of here. Because Lee was dead. Oh my fucking god Lee was dead. The enormity of it stole my strength.
I started to sink down. Evan moved to catch me. I tried to hold onto consciousness, but it was like sand through a fist. My fingers clutched Evan’s jacket and fell away, boneless. The house, Lee’s body and Evan’s face blurred together, as if I’d been submerged underwater. Evan’s voice grew more and more distant. He was speaking through a wind tunnel. Yelling across river rapids. The roar and rush of blood in my ears.
“Shh, Jo.” Evan’s voice against my ear. “You’re all right.”
He got another arm under my knees and lifted me. My head ached as it banged against Evan’s shoulder, a thousand hammers pounded from the inside my skull.
The bang of the screen door and the outside humidity wrapped around me. Then I was sitting upright. A car door shut and I smelled clean leather and coffee.
Silence.
I was alone.
“Evan? Evan!”
The wail of my voice made my head pound harder. Then he was back, sliding on my left. An engine growled to life beneath me. The house I’d lived in with Lee—pale and drab in the falling night—began to slip away. My eyes fell shut, blinded by a sudden flare of orange in the front windows as a fire caught and roared, and then I went under.
In the passenger seat, Jo sat curled away from me, her head leaning on the window and her hair curtaining her face. She’d fallen unconscious as I pulled out of the driveway, and come to a few minutes later. Every few miles, I shook her shoulder to keep her awake, certain she had a concussion.
“Is it over?” she asked, her voice small.
No, I wanted to say, it’s just beginning. But she meant the nightmare of her time with Lee, and that was most definitely fucking over.
“It’s over, Jo.”
She didn’t say anything else, but I heard the tiniest of sighs and the coiled tension in her seemed to ease. She looked so small. So frail. But she’d always been deceptively strong.
“Stay awake, okay, Jo?” I talked to her nonstop, but she hardly said more than a few words. Now and then her body trembled and I wanted to touch her so badly. My bloody and swollen fists clenched around the steering wheel. Of all the fights I’d been in, the battle with Jo’s boyfriend—husband? fiancé?—had been the most important of my life.
“Jo, you awake?”
“Where are we going?”
“Shreveport. To a hospital.”
“No.”
“You’re hurt,” I said. “I can’t take any chances.”
“No hospital.”
“Jo—”
“No hospital.” She shivered and hunched deeper in my jean jacket I’d thrown over her shoulders as we fled. I’d grabbed her bag on the way out, too. Because it had been so important to her to bring it.
“Get me as far away from that shit town as you can,” she said.
“You stay awake then. No sleeping.”
“No sleeping,” she muttered.
I took us due west along Highway 20, straight through Shreveport without stopping. My eyes were getting heavy. The adrenaline rush was tapped out, leaving me drained. We crossed the Texas-Louisiana border around midnight, and I found a roadside motel that looked obscure enough. And cheap. I parked the truck in the front of the office and told Jo to wait while I paid for a room. She nodded from under her hair. I hesitated.
“Jo?”