For 100 Nights (100 2)

For a long moment he doesn’t say anything. In the silence, I feel a spark of hope that maybe my paranoia is just that. The feeling doesn’t last.

“Hello, Avery.” My breath seizes in my lungs as the voice I dread—the one person I fear more than any other in my life right now—releases a thin chuckle. “Long time, no hear.”

I glance nervously around the store, feeling cold panic begin to bubble up inside me. “Stop calling me, you hear me? Stop texting me.” My voice is tight, clipped. I pray he’ll take it as fury and not the terror I taste on my tongue as I hiss into the receiver. “I don’t have anything to say to you.”

“Ohh, now, see? That’s where you’re wrong. You and me, we got plenty to talk about.” I hear him take a drag off a cigarette, then exhale slowly. “We can start by talkin’ about August twenty-first.”

A clamminess settles at my nape. Nine years ago on that date, my mother shot and killed her husband, Martin Coyle. He’s the reason she’s been living at Muncy State Prison all this time. I am the reason too. Because if my stepfather hadn’t been abusing me—if he hadn’t finally succeeded in doing more than that on August twenty-first—my mother wouldn’t be serving a life sentence for murder.

My temples start to pound. I’m breathing hard and fast, but I can’t seem to get air. The small store feels suddenly too hot, too crowded with other people.

“You still there, Avery?” He sounds amused. “Maybe you’d rather talk about your mom. Sounds like that fall really took a toll.”

At his emotionless tone, a chill sweeps over me. The suspicion that’s been eating at me regarding her accident at the prison two weeks ago now floods into my veins like ice water. “Did you have something to do with that?”

“Me?” He chuckles as if I just told a joke. “Now, what on earth would make you say something hurtful like that, Avery? I’m concerned about her, is all.”

“Leave her alone.” I lower my voice, trying not to be overheard inside the busy little market. “I want you to leave us both alone, damn you. Haven’t we all suffered enough?”

“Not even close, baby girl.”

The endearment grates over my senses even more than his threatening response, as I’m sure he intends. Bile surges up the back of my throat in reflex of hearing it again after so many years. “Stay away from my mother. Stay away from both of us, or I’m calling the police.”

“We both know you won’t. And we both know why.”

I ignore this last threat. Not because it’s untrue, but because of the sheer terror it ignites in me to hear him say those words. I need to protect my mom. I need to protect myself, and this new life I’m trying to create out of the ashes of my horrid past.

“I’m done with this conversation,” I snap at him. “I don’t know what you think you have to gain by harassing me or my mother, but you’re mistaken.”

“Yeah? I’m sure that rich prick you’re fucking might have something more to say about that.”

I scoff, appalled. “This is about money?”

“This is about debts, baby girl.”

A violent shudder racks me. Instead of his voice, in my head now I hear another one crooning the nauseating endearment. A voice so similar to my current harasser, because it belonged to his father, Martin Coyle.

My temples start to pound. “Don’t call me that. Don’t ever fucking call me that, or I’ll—”

“Or you’ll what, Avery? Shoot me?”

If I’d heard anger in his words—or any other emotion—it might have lessened some of my dread. But all I register is coldness. And unflinching determination.

“Leave me alone, Rodney. Please. Just . . . go away. Leave me and my mom alone.”

It takes him a second to reply. When he does, the sharpness of his voice cuts through me like a blade. Like a bullet. “We’ll talk again, Avery. You can bet your life on that.”

He ends the call and I’m left standing there, stunned and shaking.

I know Rodney means what he says.

He’s not going to leave me alone.

He’s not going to stop calling.

Now that he’s found me after all these years, he won’t stop coming after me. Not until he gets whatever it is he thinks he’s owed. Maybe not even then.

“Are you all right, miss?” One of the grocers calls to me from where he is restocking a basket of baked goods.