“You changed your hair,” he said, surprising me. And like I was a debutante in a movie, I touched the blonde curl hanging over my shoulder.

“I did.” Nice. Excellent conversational skills. “Your face healed up.”

“It always does.”

That made me smile, that small glimmer of the man from the party. Making light of dark things. I wished I could be that way, instead of this petrified rabbit I’d become.

“What happened to your neck?” he asked, and I realized my sweatshirt had gotten pulled aside enough to reveal the bruise on my collarbone.

“It’s not what you think,” I said.

“It’s not a bruise?”

“I fell.” I winced at how terrible that sounded. I put my hand over the bruise where I could feel it, hot and ugly under my skin. The senator had thrown a book at me. It did not escape me that he’d thrown it at my head, and I’d flinched so he’d missed.

And that’s not too far?

“Sure you did,” he said. “Did it hurt?”

I was about to say no, but then I realized what he was asking. What question was buried deep beneath that one. Not ‘did it hurt’? But ‘was I surviving’? Because if it still hurt, if I gave the senator that power over my body, then I would never make it. Maybe I was wrong, maybe that wasn’t what he was asking. But it’s what I heard, and that was all that mattered.

And I wished, god, how I wished I could lie, I lied to everyone else in my life about the senator. But somehow – with this stranger – the lie didn’t come. And instead, the truth slipped out.

“Yes,” I said. “It hurt.”

His lips pressed tight, and he nodded as if the information was just so disappointing to him, but what could you do? And I wanted to ask him how I could make it not hurt. Like what magic was required.

But he turned and left without another word. He left me alone with my empty house and my bruises.

Three months later, my husband committed suicide in his office. Shot himself in the head. A doctor’s record that he had advanced brain cancer splattered in blood on the desk in front of him.

4

Leonard Barrington, Esq., was written in gold on the glass door in front of me. The Q was flaking off. I wonder if the senator knew about that Q. He did not like imperfections. The urge to scrape it all off with my thumbnail was powerful. But I curled my hands into fists and resisted.

“We don’t have to do this,” Zilla said over my shoulder.

We stood at the door of the lawyer’s office in Bishop’s Landing. A cottage building down the hill from the house. I just needed to push the door open. And walk in. There was a cold drizzly rain falling down on us, dripping from my hair onto the bare skin of my neck. The cold of it was an icy pain.

“I’ve put it off twice,” I whispered, the words caught in my throat. The senator’s lawyer had been patient and understanding but putting it off one more time would be ridiculous. The funeral was two months ago, and I was running out of excuses to not meet with him. But still I wasn’t pushing open that door.

“You want to go get a drink? We don’t have—”

“I’m scared,” I said.

“I know.” Zilla put her arm around my waist, holding me up. She’d been here with me since the senator died, doing exactly this. Holding me up. “But it won’t be like when Dad died.”

My breath caught, and I let it out as slow as I could. “It will be worse.” How could it not? The one constant in my life was the senator wanted to hurt me. His being dead seemed unlikely to change that. When Dad died there was no money, and I survived. But leaving me with no money seemed the least of what the senator might do to me.

“It doesn’t matter,” Zilla said. “We’ll be fine. We will be absolutely fine. You can move in with me in New York. You can go back to school—”

“Stop,” I breathed. No dreaming. No planning. It never worked out for me. “Let’s just . . . get this over with.”

I pushed open the door to the office, and Zilla ran interference with a secretary. Soon we had tea I wasn’t going to drink and were sitting in leather chairs in front of a large desk across from Mr. Bennington, the senator’s lawyer who always reminded me of a Keebler elf. He wore a lot of sweater vests and glasses. Nice enough, but looks were deceiving. I never understood why the senator, with all his connections, had this man as a personal lawyer.

“I’m glad you could make it in,” he said. “I have some paperwork for you to take home. The senator was doing some work on the foundation, and he had a trust for his future children, but we never finalized the paperwork. There is also the deed for the house.” He gestured behind him to a box on the edge of the desk.

Tags: Molly O'Keefe Hearts Romance
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