Husband by Choice

“Is he safe?”

“Yes.” She answered with absolute conviction. And as long as she stayed away, Caleb would continue to be safe.

“And if he wasn’t, you’d do whatever it took, sacrifice your life if that’s what it took, to try to help him to safety, wouldn’t you?”

Jenna knew by the knowing look in Renee’s eyes that Renee knew she’d won this round. The older woman just had no idea how close to home her words had hit.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“WE HAVE TO get that arm looked at,” Jenna picked her half-eaten salad and bowl off the table and carried it to the undermount stainless-steel sink in the bungalow’s decent-size kitchen. Granite countertops completed the elegant space.

Shaking her head, Renee stood, too, though a bit more stiffly than Jenna had, more stiffly than a woman in her mid-sixties should have needed to, and Jenna figured she was witnessing years’ worth of beatings in the other woman’s slow-to-move body.

Renee’s abuse had to stop. The woman deserved so much better.

“You’ve been at the shelter for how long? Six weeks?”

“About that.”

“And no one knows you saw Brian Sunday.”

“That’s right.”

“So why would the shelter’s nurse have to report an injury sustained while you were apart from your abuser?”

“She’s going to ask what happened.”

“From the way Carly talks about her, I don’t think Lynn will press for any answers that aren’t critical to your immediate safety and physical health.”

After they rinsed their bowls and Jenna helped Renee straighten up the rest of the kitchen, Jenna hung up her towel and looped her arm through Renee’s good one. “Come on,” she said. “I’ll be there with you and I’ll answer anything you can’t.”

Lynn didn’t press Renee for any answers she wasn’t willing to give. She’d gone to the park in town Sunday afternoon and come back with an arm that needed attention, and no, she didn’t need to have the police called. There had been no surprise visits from her abuser. And her injury had been caused by pressure to the arm. She’d gone on to say that perhaps she had osteoporosis, a hypothesis that Lynn didn’t react to one way or another as she x-rayed and taped Renee’s cracked, but not broken, bone.

Lynn’s parting remark, “Make sure you bring up the incident in your session with Sara this week,” was the only indication that she suspected the whole truth wasn’t being told in that

room that night.

Jenna walked Renee home and wondered if any of them would ever live a life free from the secrets they all kept safe.

* * *

MAX PRETENDED TO himself that he was surprised when Chantel showed up shortly after he’d put Caleb down for the night on Tuesday. He’d known his first wife’s best friend was off duty at three that afternoon.

“If you’d said you were driving all this way, I’d have told you not to,” he said in greeting as he opened the door to her.

She came into the house as though she’d been doing so for years, the bag over her shoulder telling him she was planning on staying the night.

“Why do you think I didn’t let you know?” she asked, dropping her duffle bag on the floor of the living room.

“You’ve heard something, haven’t you?”

She nodded. “This afternoon. My friend on the Santa Raquel force, he called and said he’d been talking to another guy in the locker room this morning. He’d just asked the guy to keep an unofficial lookout for Meredith. He showed him her picture, and the guy recognized her. He’d seen her at a bus stop on Sunday not far from the beach.... She had on a hat, but he was sure it was her....”

Chantel continued to talk as all of the blood drained from Max’s face. He felt it go. And could count his pulse without feeling for it, as it roared through his ears.

She’d been there.

Caleb had seen his mother. “She’d been running, Max, and tripped.”