Husband by Choice

Her pans. The dishes she’d chosen when they’d moved from the apartment to their house in a nice desert community outside of Las Vegas.

She stood there and stared. All thoughts of a plan, of abuse and life and even death...just stood still. “You kept it all.”

“Of course I did!” Steve came into her peripheral vision. He opened a couple of drawers. “Here are your favorite black utensils,” he said, “right next to the stove where you like them. And over here are all of the others.” The drawer was twice the size of the drawer she’d had in Vegas.

He’d paid attention to the finest detail.

And knew her far better than she’d ever realized.

Or maybe she had known and hadn’t been able to accept the disturbing ramifications, the fact that his intimate knowledge gave him power over her. “I did good, didn’t I?” He was a little boy in a grown man’s body.

“Yeah.” The word was drawn out of her. “You did good.”

“Now do you believe how much I love you?”

He came closer, walking that walk. The one where his hips swaggered a bit and he was going to grab her by the hips and press himself against her.

“I never doubted your love, Steve.” Turning, she dug into the cupboards. Buying herself time. Doing her desperate best to keep control of her mind.

And take control of his at the same time.

The task was much harder than she’d imagined. She wasn’t even positive she’d be able to handle her own thoughts.

He was a bad man. A very bad man.

“Look, here’s my baby cup!” Someone had given it to her when they’d cleaned out her folks’ house. It was sterling and had her name on it.

She’d thought she’d lost it.

“And my set of Corelle.” They’d quit making the pattern she’d liked best.

“I brought your clothes, too,” he said. “Everything’s in the closet and drawers just like you like it.”

“You plan to have us live here?”

“It’s where you want to be, isn’t it? Since this is where you came. You love the ocean. I could tell when I saw you there all those Sundays.”

Her stomach cramped again as an eerie sense of death washed over her. He’d been watching her with Max and Caleb.

For a long time.

Probably since before the baby was born. The whole time she’d been pregnant....

Oh, Max, I need you! The cry tore from her heart and reverberated through every pore in her body.

Please! Be here! Remind me that I belong to you, not him. That you are real.

But she didn’t belong to him anymore.

She’d left him.

* * *

MAX PRACTICALLY BROKE the chair he’d been sitting in as he raced to grab his cell phone from the counter Sunday afternoon. Caleb was still at the shelter. They planned to keep him for the night because Max needed to be ready to leave the house on a second’s notice.

“Have you found her?” he asked, as soon as he saw Chantel’s number come up.

“No, Max. And it’s not good news.”