The General (Professionals 4)

“You’re a pretty amazing woman, Jenny,” I told her, voice forceful because I wanted her to believe it. I wanted her to believe I believed it, that I wasn’t just feeding her empty compliments. “I don’t think you have heard that nearly enough.”

“Never,” she whispered under her breath, likely thinking I wouldn’t hear. But I did.

“And that is a fucking crime,” I told her, giving her thigh a squeeze as I pulled off the highway and into the lot of the grocery store. “Are you in the mood for anything in particular?” I asked, letting the subject drop, somehow knowing that if I pushed it too hard, she would push back or pull away. I didn’t want either of those. Not now that we had finally made a little progress.

An hour later, we were sitting down to baked ziti she had decided she could wait for if I picked her up a bag of white cheddar cheeze balls to hold her over while I cooked.

“He’s why I stayed,” she said oddly, out of the blue, her gaze trained on her plate, watching the air puff up around the gooey cheese-covered noodles.

“What is why you stayed?” I asked, brows drawing down.

“My dad,” she clarified. “That is why I stayed. With Teddy,” she told me. She snuck a glance up, watching my confused expression. “We established that I was young and spineless when I married Teddy.”

“Young, yes. But spineless is not a word I would use.”

“I was. Spineless. Foolish too. And decidedly unworldly. I didn’t even know what a prenup was then. I grew up poor. That word never factored in. What would anyone want to protect? Their fifty-year-old trailer?”

“Teddy made you sign a prenup?” I asked, guiding her back on-point.

“An ironclad one. That was what the lawyer I went to see back then said. Right after Teddy beat me for the first time. I may have been young and foolish, but I knew that women who got beaten once would get beaten again. I wanted to get out. It was a few weeks after the accident. And Teddy came home drunk. And… yeah. The lawyer said that if I divorced Teddy, I would get nothing. There would be no money for my father’s care. This was back when he was just in the hospital recovering. The bills were… exorbitant. And he needed every bit of care he got. Or he wouldn’t have made it at all. So I stayed. I figured it would just be a couple more weeks. Maybe a couple more months at most. I figured I could leave once he was on his feet again.”

“But he never really got on his feet again.”

“And I couldn’t have ever afforded that rehab center. Or even a live-in. And where did that leave him? Trying to fend for himself? Having a seizure while I was at work trying to keep a roof over our heads? It was bad enough that he was this way because of me. I wasn’t going to be the reason he died after he was given a second chance. I just… I have so much on my conscience. I couldn’t take anything else. So I stayed. I endured. I convinced myself that it was for the greater good.”

Christ.

What a brutal, hopeless, lonely life she had lived.

I wanted to dig up Teddy, reanimate him, and kill him my fucking self.

Jenny fell silent, blowing on her food, but not really eating it.

It felt like it was now or never.

To ask.

To get the details.

She was talking. Openly. She was giving me all the pieces without me having to pry them out, feeling guilty for doing so.

I had to ask.

If she didn’t want to tell me, she didn’t have to. But if she wanted to share, but just didn’t know how much to give me so soon, I didn’t want her to keep it to herself out of uncertainty, feeling like it was too heavy a topic for such a budding relationship.

Because, well, that was what this was. For me at least. A budding relationship. Something important starting.

And if we wanted that, if we wanted something that required so much of us, we had to give the other person all the bits. Even the hard ones. The ugly ones.

So I asked.

And, what’s more, I had been right. She wanted to tell me. She was just waiting for me to want to know.

“Sweetheart, how the fuck did you end up with Teddy in the first place?”

She gave me a smile that wasn’t really a smile at all.

And then she laid it all out there.

Raw and ugly as it was.

NINE

Jenny

I wasn’t one of those children who was blithely unaware of how poor they were.

I was acutely, painfully cognizant of the discrepancy between many of the kids in school and the handful of kids who grew up in the trailer park I did.