“What happened?”
“The usual,” she responded. She seemed to want to leave it at that, but I wouldn’t let her. Eventually she told me the rest. “He was drunk; Mom was yelling, and I was stuck between them. The major difference was that I had decided I wasn’t going to do it anymore.”
“Do what?”
“Put up with him and his crap!” she growled. “He could have really hurt me when he pushed me out of that car, and then he just left me there! I wasn’t going to listen to him go on about how he came right back and was so sorry and spent hours looking for me—it was bullsh
it, and I wasn’t going to listen to it!”
She took a deep breath before she went on.
“I told him I’d found someone else.” Lia glanced at me, seeming embarrassed for a moment. “I know we didn’t really…well, it’s not like we committed to each other or anything, but for the first time since high school, I realized there were other options out there besides Will and how he treated me.”
She looked up at me, and her eyes began to sparkle with tears.
“It’s all right,” I soothed. “Go on.”
“He didn’t like that answer,” she said with a shrug. “He started yelling, and Mom told him he needed to just leave. She came up near us, and he pushed her away. Then he grabbed my arm and squeezed really hard–”
Lia’s breath caught in her throat, and the tears that had been building up since I stopped her at the door finally cascaded down her cheeks. Dealing with crying chicks was definitely not something within my repertoire, so I went with the only thing I could think of—I grabbed the box of tissues from the bathroom and handed them to her.
Lia wiped her eyes and gripped her fingers around the crumpled tissue as she composed herself.
“I had bruises there for over a week afterwards. Mom started yelling—said she was going to call the police—and that made him let go. I told him we were through and that I never wanted to see him again.”
“What did he do?”
“He laughed. He said I was his, and nothing was going to change that.”
A tickle in the back of my head—one that was rarely wrong—told me that I was going to kill that motherfucker someday.
“He still wasn’t leaving, so Mom ran inside the house and came back out with the phone in her hand. When he realized that she really was calling the cops, he got in the car and left. That was the last I saw him.”
I tried to clear my head enough to listen to the rest of the story, but it wasn’t easy. I didn’t know what the asshole looked like, but I had enough of a vision in my head that I could see myself with the business end of my Beretta in his face. At some point, I was going to have to find a picture of the guy and make all that come true.
Lia continued.
“Mom immediately started quizzing me about the ‘new guy’ and if that meant I really was done with William for good.”
I sat still, wondering just what she might have told her mother about me, not that Lia knew much at that time—even less than she did now—but it still left me feeling a little uneasy. I wondered if any other girl had ever described me to her mother.
“What did you tell her?” I asked.
“Not much.” Lia shrugged one shoulder. “I mean, I didn’t know much, did I? I said you were retired from the military, and we had just met by accident. Once she found out what the ‘accident’ was, it kind of distracted her from the original conversation. We never really talked about you again until I was leaving.”
Her eyes found mine.
“She told me to be careful,” Lia said. “She told me that I didn’t really know much about you and that you might not even be who I think you are.”
“What did you say?”
“I told her I would be careful and not to worry. I didn’t know much about you, but I was sure you weren’t like William. We both considered that a step up, so that was it.”
Lia stared down at her hands as tears started spilling off her eyelashes again.
“And then…and then…” Lia sniffed and wiped at her nose with the tissue again. “Then I found that cabin and your note, and I just…I didn’t know what to do or what to think.”
Without knowing what else I could do, I reached out and took her hand again. Lia’s fingers gripped mine, and she leaned against my shoulder. With one arm around her, I pulled her against my chest and rubbed up and down the top part of her arm while she cried.