The Dark Light of Day (The Dark Light of Day 1)

“You’re out of your goddamned mind.”

“Now, sugar, don’t go using the good Lord’s name in vain. It’s not the Christian thing to do. This is a business transaction—your account of what happened in exchange for me dropping the charges for torching my house. You’re the one who ruined this, Abby. You could have taken your money and gotten out of town, but instead you chose to go all avenging angel on me.”

“Fuck you.” I’ll go to jail, I thought. After what I’ve been through, jail would be like summer camp.

Bring it bitch.

“Doesn’t matter to me, darlin’. It’s not like you can prove anything, not like Owen will ever be charged, what with his father being county judge and all. It’s a simple decision really.” She leaned over the table and propped her chin up on her elbows. “Jail, or your signature. You make the call.”

She was right, but I didn’t care. This wasn’t about making sure Owen was prosecuted for what he’d done to me. This was about not letting these people own me.

I wasn’t a piece of land or livestock.

They could take their power and shove it up their asses.

Bethany had a victory smile already plastered on her overly botoxed face. It was time to rip it the fuck off.

“I don’t think you quite understand something, Mrs. Fletcher.” I mimicked her posture, leaning and pressing myself as close to her as my cuffed hands would let me. “The last thing you want to do is fuck with someone who has nothing to lose. I want your entire family to leave me alone, and I want Owen to stay at least one hundred yards away from me at all times. I mean it. If he sees me on one side of the street, he needs to cross to the other.”

“This isn’t a negotiation. I’ve laid out your options so you pick. Jail or signature. End of story.” She placed the papers back into her briefcase and clicked the locks shut. She stood. “What will it be, Miss Ford?”

“Fuck you.”

She shrugged and turned to leave, but before she could twist the knob on the door, she turned and looked at me. “Enjoy jail, Abby. It’s always nice when a daughter follows in her parents’ footsteps.”

Bitch.

I had to pull out the only card I had left to play.

“Hey, Bethany.” She glanced at me over her shoulder. “Did you know that photography was a hobby of mine?”

She froze and turned all the way back around. Her face had gone pale.

I felt a tickle on my nose and bent over to scratch it on the table. “I’m more of a documentary kind-of photographer, really. I like to tell a story with my pictures, you know? It’s amazing what the camera picks up when you’re naked in the mirror. Even in black and white photos, you can see where the purple of each bruise looks gray, where the dried blood looks almost black. You can almost see the yellow tone in the swelling of a black eye… or two.”

She crossed the small room in two strides leaned over the table, bracing both arms on it for support. “All that proves is that someone hurt you. It doesn’t prove who did it.”

“I have copies of the pictures and my statement of what happened that night in three different locations. If something were to happen to me, if Owen does this to someone else, or if you don’t follow through with my demands, there is a plan in place to send them to every newspaper and media outlet within a hundred miles. I won’t be the one rotting away in a jail cell. Owen will be. I’m guessing shortly after that, I won’t be the only rape victim in this whole situation, either.”

I was bluffing about everything but the photos.

She tried to stifle her gasp. She shifted her grip on the table before making her decision.

“Owen leaves you alone, and the charges against you are dropped. Is that what you want?”

“Yes. And I’m not signing a fucking thing,” I added.

She grabbed her briefcase and headed out the door. Sheriff Fletcher met her on the other side. A wicked smile crossed her lips. “I’ll think about it. In the meantime, Carl,” she said as she put her hand on Sheriff Fletcher’s shoulder, “please take Abby to the infirmary. It seems she needs medical attention.”

It was only a half-assed sucker punch to my cheek. It would bruise, but it didn’t hurt. It was a mosquito bite compared to what I’d experienced at Owen’s hands. “No need. I’m fine.”

“Are you?” Bethany winked over her shoulder at me as Sheriff Fletcher entered the room and closed the door behind him. He pulled a nightstick from his belt.

Oh. Fuck.

CHAPTER TWENTY

I AWOKE SO SUDDENLY, it felt like I’d been launched into consciousness. I sat straight up, flinging some sort of ice pack off my forehead and across the room. My ribs protested. I clutched them in apology.

I was in a small sea foam-colored room, I assumed in the infirmary at the police station. Coral Pines didn’t even have a real hospital, and the nearest emergency room was over thirty minutes away in the next town over. So when people had non life threatening injuries—or were beaten by the sheriff with a night stick—they came here, like a bunch of elementary school kids at the fucking nurse’s office.

The paper from the exam table crinkled under my movement as I slowly swung my feet over to the floor. There was a cotton ball with a small bandage over it stuck to my inner arm. I felt sore and woozy, and very much like I’d just gotten my ass kicked by a fat man swinging a heavy plastic baton.

I did a physical inventory. I started at my toes, wiggling each before I bent my knees and lifted my arms. I worked my way up, until I was pressing my fingers against my face to make sure my skull was still intact. I was swollen and in pain, and I may have had a cracked rib or two, but this time I knew I was going to live.

Dammit.

An older woman in pink scrubs walked into the room, staring down at a manila file in her hands as she moved. I recognized her as Glinda Mallory, one of the ladies from Nan’s church group. She flashed me what passed as a professional smile. There was little warmth in it.

“How are you feeling, Miss Ford? Do you know where you are?” She moved right to the second question as if she didn’t give a shit about the answer to the first. She pulled on a pair of latex gloves and tried to push me back down onto the exam table, but I dodged her. She reached for my face with one of her gloved hands, and I raced for the other side of the room, my head throbbing. “I can’t care for you if you won’t let me touch you.”

“You examined me while I was unconscious, right? You lifted my shirt up, saw what I had going on under there? Does it look like being touched has worked out for me?”

She closed her mouth and shook her head.

“I’ll be okay, really. Thank you for wanting to help.” Oddly, I was trying to comfort the nurse who should have been comforting me. “Do you have anything for the pain?”

I held onto my head with both hands in an attempt to gain some balance. I didn’t know if she knew what just happened here, but I suspected that, as the nurse at the Sheriff’s station, she knew enough not to ask.

She pulled off her gloves and tossed them in a red trash bin. “It isn’t advisable to take pain killers while pregnant, you know.”

She was just full of information I didn’t need or care about. “I’ll be sure to keep that in mind when I’m having a baby. For now, can I get some sort of drug to take the edge off all this? My ribs are fucking killing me.”

She grabbed her file and sat on a short rolling stool using her feet to wheel herself over to me. “I had suspected you didn’t know, but it’s proper procedure before administering any sort of narcotics to an unconscious person to test them for conditions such as pregnancy.” She didn’t even give me time to process that information before adding, “Do you know who the father is?”

“I’m sorry. What are you asking me?” I was trying to process the information, but between her cold distance and my throbbing head and ribs, it was difficult to understand her coded message.

“You may want to alert the father before you make any hasty decisions,” she added while scribbling on her clipboard. “You can always come see the ladies group at the church. They are really good at handling cases like yours.”

Cases? Like mine?

“Father?”

“Yes. As in father of your unborn child. You’re pregnant, Miss Ford.”

My chest tightened, the pain increasing with each breath as they got shallower and shallower. I couldn’t hold air in my lungs. The room started to spin. The nurse came and went in my line of site. Seconds earlier, I was holding my head in order to ease the ache. Now, I was just trying to hold my shit together. I had to think.

Jake and I were careful. We used condoms.

The only thing Owen had used was me.

My life was more than just a single disaster. It was many disasters, all happening at the same time. It was a tsunami after a hurricane after an earthquake happening in the middle of a tornado, while a wildfire blazed in a circle around me. I waded through the wreckage of one and right into the next.

I was pregnant, and Owen was the father.

***

Two minutes can be a lot longer than most people realize.

Two minutes was all it took for me to move from liking Jake to loving him.