Chloe #2
The drive home this time feels longer than it actually is. I lose myself in feelings of satisfaction as the dense wood lining the dark road thins, and the winding asphalt straightens out as I make my way closer to town.
The thrill of the kill always hits like a post-workout glow. My body feels strong and weightless at the same time, my heart full and hopeful. One more bad guy gone from the world, and he was a bad one, whatever his name was.
What I do remember is his wife’s name. Lily. She is just how you’d expect a lily to be. Pale and gentle. Pure. And now that her awful husband is gone from the world, she can be reborn.
And collect on his life insurance policy.
Her and her children will be set for life. No more trips to the hospital. No more looking over their shoulders. And maybe most importantly, no more domestic violence shelters.
My mother’s experience in domestic violence shelters was much like Lily’s has been.
They felt displaced. Alone.
The location is low-key, secure, but they didn’t feel safe.
The shelter wasn’t home. Not that home was much better at the time.
The shelters were temporary, in a world that already felt temporary enough because they were afraid for their lives.
And as for my mother and Lily, they felt every painful reminder of that fact.
They had access to resources. They felt empowered. They met new friends. Hell, I even made a couple friends there.
It all faded into blackness when we returned home without an actual plan. When the reason we’d ended up there in the first place wrapped its cold, lanky fingers around our ankles and drug us back to the hell we thought we’d escaped.
It was all fleeting for us. The empowerment.
The safety. The friends. And in the moments we were being dragged, I was envious of the women who made it out.
The ones who used the safety plan, new friends, and resources, going on to find true safety and success.
I banged my fists as my belly scraped along the ground because I wanted to be them. Not us. In this hell.
We lost everything. We lost us. We were on our way to losing our actual lives. Until that spark of fire twinkled in my mother’s pretty eyes again.
And Lily, she’ll get her spark of fire back, too.
All of those things she feels when she leaves the shelter—the faint beacon of hope in the distance that things are going to be different this time—that beacon will be permanent for her.
Because her husband just became cougar chow, and she’ll never have to worry about losing herself to him again.
The light pollution of my small town comes into view as I crest the hill back into Devil’s Peak. As it fogs up the night sky in the distance, I take a left into my neighborhood on the outskirts, navigating the rising, winding road to my cul-de-sac.
I pass Barry MacGregor’s car parked by the curb and pull into my driveway, stopping just inside the iron gates to walk to the mailbox.
I’d gotten used to coming home to a slew of reporters parked out front, but Barry seems to be the only one whose interest never waned even when the coverage of my mother’s arrest slowed in the media.
As I continue down the driveway, I think of the man I wish was parked out front. The one man who I shouldn’t want, but do.
It’s hard to imagine a life where I actually get my happy ending. Where I manage to balance a life of hunting and death with happiness and devotion.
Considering the man who put my mother in prison is the man I want to teeter that line with, and he’s long gone, it doesn’t look like I’ll get my chance.
I can practically feel the memory of him, the whisper of his fingertips across my skin as he plastered my back against whatever hard surface he would trap me between.
He’d bring his lips close to mine, promise to find evidence that would put me away for life, but I couldn’t help but feel that the only thing he was doing was protecting me from everyone.
The reporters. The sideways glances. He was always jumping between me and some wannabe predator, feigning contempt, and all I felt was the smoldering heat where his skin met mine.
Barry climbs out of his vehicle and saunters in my direction. The distance between us shrinks out of the corner of my eye as I stand at the mailbox and flip through the envelopes. Bills. Solicitors.
A letter from my mother from Four Peaks Penitentiary.
“Hey, Chloe.” Barry stands off to the side trying to appear uninterested in what’s in my hand, even though he’s leaning slightly forward and his eyebrows are raised, clearly trying to peek at the lettering on my mail.
I flip my mother’s letter to the back of the pile and ignore the way his focus shifts to my outfit, obviously curious about why I’m coming home with the wilderness painted onto my skin.
“Barry.” Turning from him, I move back in the direction of my car.
“Where you been?” he calls behind me, stuck at the edge of my property line.
“Out.”
“Did you hear?” he calls again.
I don’t want to let it pique my interest. Nothing any of the local reporters say should interest me, let alone the one who plastered my mother’s makeup-free face and orange jumpsuit on the front page of The Peak.
Plastered my face on the front page the year following her arrest with headlines like Did the Black Widow Act Alone?
and Baby Widow Makes a Home in Murder House.
Shit, there was even one that said Baby Widow Ventures Out for Coffee.
On the front page. Like the community members of Devil’s Peak had nothing better to do than look at pictures of me ordering and then sipping on a fucking latte.
And now, he probably just wants to snap a picture of me, standing in my driveway covered in mud, so he can write a headline for tomorrow’s paper and ignite the buzz again. Baby Widow Makes a Mess, Gets the Mail.
Groundbreaking.
But there’s something about the way the words leave his lips that does make me curious.
Something about the way the words imply I’m going to want to hear this.
I can’t stop myself from slowly turning back in his direction from the safety of my driveway.
His lips turn up into a smile, and he holds onto whatever knowledge he’s hoarding for a moment longer—to make me suffer, no doubt—before he says the two words that simultaneously buries the grains of dirt deeper into my pores and clears the mud from my soul entirely.
“He’s back.”