“It was a woman. His truck landed right on top of her and crushed her inside her car. She’s dead.”
“Oh, no, no.” I had to sit down. I tried to get back to the bed, but the room tilted. I grabbed at the side table, knocking the lamp to the floor and shattering the bulb into tiny fragments. Sophie would step on them. I bent down and frantically gathered the pieces, and sliced my finger. I stared at the wound, my mind filling with images of mangled metal and blood in the snow. A woman. He’d killed a woman.
Sophie was clutching at my arm. “Mommy, Mommy!” she was saying, but I couldn’t answer. I could only sob. On the other end of the phone I heard my brother crying too.
I’d drugged my husband and run away with his daughter, knowing he would chase after me. Now someone was dead. I would never be free.
PART TWO
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
DECEMBER 2016
Sophie catches an errant string of melted cheese on her finger and sucks it into her mouth, laughs as some gets on her chin. I smile, glad for this moment. When she was a child, Andrew never let us eat in the living room, and there’s no way he’d let me order takeout.
I’d picked up a vegetarian pizza from our favorite place for our Thursday night tradition of watching The Bachelorette together. We talk about the guys, the dresses, who we’d pick. She’s been at Delaney’s all day, while I cleaned the house, trying to erase Andrew’s touch, his lingering essence, and rehearsed twenty different ways to have this conversation.
Sophie glances at me with a cheeky smile. “I saw the stew in the garbage. Were you trying to burn the house down?”
“Too bad for you I don’t have any insurance money.”
She laughs and takes a bite of her pizza, then leans back into the couch, pulling one of the pillows down under her shoulder. We both have our legs propped onto the coffee table. This would have been another unforgivable sin in Andrew’s eyes and I almost yank them away, can hear his voice in my mind. Only men sit like that, Lindsey. I force myself to hold still.
“There’s something we need to talk about.” I pick up the remote and turn down the volume. I can’t wait any longer, can feel the words clawing to get out.
“What’s going on?” Her eyes are wide, her mouth full of pizza. “Am I in trouble for something?”
“Should you be?”
“Of course not. I’m an angel.”
“Right. Well, your halo is a little tarnished.” Sophie is a good kid, but she’s done the normal stuff, sneaking booze, missing her curfew.
She reaches up, pretends to straighten an imaginary halo, then stops and gives me a look. “Wait. You’re not pregnant, are you?”
“No, no.” I’m taking too long to explain. I have to spit this out before she leaps to any other conclusions. “Your father was in our house yesterday.”
Her body jerks forward as if I bad hit her. “What are you talking about?”
“When I came home, I noticed some e-mails were opened on my computer.” I hesitate about telling her everything I found. I don’t want to scare her too much.
“So you don’t know if it was actually him. It could have been a computer glitch.” She looks relieved, and I realize I made a mistake by holding back.
“I’m sorry, Sophie, it was definitely him. He opened all my bills and put a book beside my bathtub with some candles. There was no sign of a break-in, though.”
I see the look in her yes, the realization. “I forgot to set the alarm!”
I nod. “It’s okay. I know it was an accident—but you have to be more careful. This morning I talked to the police and applied for a peace bond—it’s like a restraining order. Andrew could fight it, but if it’s approved, he can’t come near me or he’ll get sent back to jail.”
She’s staring at me, two red splotches on her cheeks. “What do you think he wants?”
“I’m not sure, but he read an e-mail from Greg.… It was personal.” I’d called Jenny from my cell while I waited for the pizza and told her Andrew had been in my house. She invited me to Vancouver again, but I can’t walk away from everything yet. Not when Sophie is so close to graduation and I’ve finally built my business up to a level where I’m not running in the red every month. This time of year is when I get extra bookings. I need that money to carry us through.
Sophie’s staring up at the TV, the glow casting a blue light on her skin. She swallows a few times and I know she’s trying not to cry.
“I saw him outside the bank a few days ago,” I say. “I was careful, but he must’ve followed me home and that’s how he found out where we live.” I think again about what he’d said. I know you drugged me. For weeks after the accident, I’d waited to see if the police had done any sort of blood tests. When nothing ever happened, I assumed I was safe. Would he tell them now? Could I get in trouble? I remind myself that it’s been over ten years and he can’t prove anything.
She turns and looks at me. “You didn’t tell me you saw him!”