Deserves to Die (Alvarez & Pescoli)

No, thank you.

Fleeing or turning herself in to the police were her options.

If she ran again, she was only putting off the inevitable. Buying a little frantic time. Putting more people in danger. Again, she’d pass.

That left going to the police, telling them her story, and hoping they would believe her, trust her, go against all the evidence.

She turned onto the county road and the streetlights gave way to darkness. No car seemed to be following her and the more distance she put between herself and Grizzly Falls, the more she told herself to relax. She had only one more night on the run, then, come morning, her life would take another turn and change.

Forever.

“So be it,” she said, the beams from her headlights cutting through the deep night. A few snowflakes drifted lazily from the night sky to catch in the light. As she left the city behind she should have felt calm, but instead, she was still uneasy. Restless. She fiddled with the radio and heard an old Johnny Cash song on a country station that kept cutting out. She thought of her family and a bitter taste rose in her throat. Would they come to Montana? Would she be sent to Louisiana where she would face them again through iron bars or through thick glass where they could only speak through phones mounted in the walls? Or would they abandon her?

Did she even care? Those ties had been severed a while back, their frayed ends unable to be stitched back together.

She had, of course, not only betrayed and embarrassed them, she’d renounced them publicly, a sin for which she would never be forgiven. Her mother and father lived by a very stiff and archaic set of standards. A public life that was, to all who looked at it, picture-perfect. No cracks to be seen. But once the doors were closed, their private life was very different and very guarded.

She’d known the rules growing up.

She’d not only broken them, she’d done so in a very public way.

She remembered the day she’d first confronted her mother.

Outside on a lounge chair, her mother was reading a paperback. Wearing a sundress and dark glasses, she’d positioned herself on the porch in the shade of the overhanging oak tree, leaving only her legs exposed to the sunlight.

Though it was barely nine in the morning, the summer heat was sweltering, the day sultry, almost sticky, a haze in the blue Louisiana sky. An Olympic-sized pool, her father’s prized possession, abutted the veranda of her parents’ home outside New Orleans. It shimmered as it stretched far into the tended backyard.

“Mom?” Anne-Marie called, gathering her nerves.

Jeanette looked up and set her paperback onto her lap. A glass of sweet tea was sweating on the small table beside the lounge chair. A smaller glass of ice and a clear liquid, most likely gin, sat near a pack of long cigarettes by the ashtray and a lighter. Paddle fans, as always, were softly whirling overhead. Butterflies with orange and black wings flitted through the heavily blossomed bougainvillea flanking the yard.

“This is a surprise.” Jeanette smiled, but Anne-Marie knew it was false. Jeanette Favier had never been a warm person.

“I have something to tell you.”

“Oh.” Nothing more. Just the hint of disappointment from dealing with a daughter who had continually disappointed and bothered her.

“It’s about . . . him.”

“Again?” Her mother sighed, her smile falling away. “Why you have such a problem with your husband, I’ll never understand. Marriage isn’t easy, and given your . . . condition, you’re lucky he wanted you.”

“My condition. You mean because I was a little wild?” Anne-Marie challenged.

Her mother sighed through her nose. “Your brothers were ‘a little wild,’ but you pushed the boundaries, got yourself in that accident and—” She stopped. “Oh, well.”

“Go ahead. Say it. I’ve never been the same since. Isn’t that what you were going to tell me? You blame me for falling off a damn horse and hitting my head and think that’s the cause of every bad thing that’s happened to me since.”

“You were in a coma for days, but of course, you don’t remember that. When you finally woke up”—Jeanette shook slightly—“you were . . . different.”

“With a condition.”

“You went from bad to worse. I’d thought . . . no, I’d hoped . . . when you finally decided to get married that you would settle down, make a decent life for yourself. But that’s not the way it ever is with you.”

“He’s not the man I thought he was.”

“No one is. We all have girlhood dreams of white knights and thunderous steeds and chivalrous men who pledge their lives to us, but in the end, they are all just men.” Jeanette let out a long breath and shook her head. “Have you forgotten the ‘for better or worse’ part of your vows?”

“He hit me, Mom.”