Chapter 13
CHLOE
Seven years.
The divorce papers sat on the kitchen table, approved and stamped and bearing the seal of the Denver County Court.
Final. Done. I stared at them for a long time, reading the words without really seeing them, because the words didn’t matter as much as what they meant.
Freedom. Safety. The end of the worst chapter of my life, printed on paper and signed by a judge who had never met me but had just given me back my future.
I took a deep breath.
It came out shaking. Long and unsteady and carrying a weight that I hadn’t realized was sitting on my lungs until it lifted.
Three years of marriage to Jonathan Perry, son of Mayor Gerald Perry, golden boy of Denver’s political elite, and the single worst decision I had ever made.
Three years, reduced to a stack of legal documents and a stamp that said dissolved.
I pressed my palms flat against the table and let the relief wash through me.
Jonathan had been good at first. That was the part that made it so hard to explain to people who hadn’t lived it.
He’d been charming, attentive, the kind of man who held doors and remembered your coffee order and looked at you like you were the center of every room.
He’d accepted Emma without hesitation. Held her, played with her, called her “princess” in front of his parents and colleagues.
He’d stepped into the role of stepfather like he’d been waiting for it, and I’d let myself believe that maybe, maybe, this was the life I was supposed to have after everything fell apart.
But something changed after the wedding.
The ring went on and something behind his eyes shifted, slow enough that I didn’t notice it at first, like a tide pulling back before a wave.
A comment about what I was wearing. A question about who I’d been texting.
A hand on my arm that stayed too long and gripped too tight and left fingerprints I learned to cover with long sleeves.
The charm didn’t disappear in public. It stayed polished and perfect for his father’s campaign events and Sunday brunches with his mother.
But behind closed doors, the mask came off, and what lived underneath was possessive and cold and increasingly dangerous.
He got more intense. More controlling. He monitored my phone, my schedule, my friendships.
He decided what I wore to events. He told me which parents I could talk to at Emma’s school and which ones I couldn’t.
He turned affection into a reward system and silence into punishment, and the space I was allowed to exist in got smaller and smaller until I was living in a box the size of his approval.
I tried to hold on. I told myself marriages were work. I told myself he was stressed from the campaign. I told myself that the good days still outnumbered the bad ones, even when they didn’t, even when I’d stopped counting because the math had gotten too depressing.
Then he hit Emma.
She was four. She’d spilled juice on his papers, the ones he’d been working on for his father’s reelection strategy, and his hand came up and caught the side of her face before I’d even registered the movement.
The sound of it, palm against the small, soft cheek of my daughter, was the sound of every excuse I’d ever made shattering at once.
Emma didn’t cry right away. She just looked at him with those big green eyes, her father’s eyes, though Jonathan didn’t know that and never would, and the confusion on her face was worse than screaming.
She didn’t understand. She was four years old and she didn’t understand why the man who called her “princess” had just hurt her.
I had her in the car within the hour. I filed for divorce the next morning.
Jonathan’s family fought it with everything they had, because a Perry divorce was a scandal and scandals were bad for campaigns.
His lawyers dragged it out for two years.
Two years of hearings and motions and delays designed to exhaust me into giving up.
Two years of restraining orders that his father’s connections made toothless.
Two years of looking over my shoulder, of moving apartments twice, of Emma asking why we couldn’t stay in one place and me telling her it was an adventure because the truth was not something you told a six-year-old who still slept with the light on.
But the judge had seen the photos. The bruise on Emma’s cheek. The bruises on my arms. And the gavel came down with a finality that not even a mayor’s money could argue with.
It was over.
I picked up the envelope, pressed it to my chest, and closed my eyes. Sixty seconds. I gave myself sixty seconds of standing in my kitchen with my eyes shut, breathing, feeling the weight of it lifted, letting the relief settle into my bones like warmth returning after a long winter.
Then I set the papers down and went to check on Emma.
She was in the living room, cross-legged on the rug, building a tower out of blocks with the focused intensity she applied to everything.
She had my stubbornness and her father’s eyes and a laugh that could fill a cathedral, and looking at her was like looking at the best and most terrifying thing I’d ever done.
“Mama, look,” she said without looking up. “It’s a castle for the dinosaurs.”
“Dinosaurs live in castles?”
“The royal ones do.”
I smiled. The first real smile in weeks. “Of course. How silly of me.”
My phone buzzed. Dollie’s name on the screen, accompanied by approximately seventeen heart emojis, because Dollie had never met a single emoji when forty-seven would do.
“Tell me you signed,” Dollie said before I could even say hello.
“It’s done. Approved and everything.”
“Oh, thank God. Finally. I’m coming to visit. I’m already packing. I miss you. I miss Emma. I miss her little face and her little dinosaur obsession and the way she calls me Auntie Dee.”
Dollie had remained my anchor through all of it.
Seven years, two hundred miles, and a life that had gone sideways in every possible direction, and she was still there.
Still calling every week. Still driving down to visit once a year with cookies and wine and the particular brand of aggressive love that was her specialty.
When I’d left Pinewood Ridge, I’d lost almost everything.
But I hadn’t lost Dollie. She wouldn’t allow it.
“When are you coming?” I asked.
“This weekend. I’m already on my way, actually. Left an hour ago. Josh says hi. He also says to tell you the sawmill roof finally got fixed, which is code for ‘I have no idea how to participate in this conversation but I want to be included.’”
I laughed, and the laugh felt like water on dry earth.
“Give Emma a kiss from Auntie Dee,” Dollie said. “Tell her I’m bringing a surprise.”
“She’s going to ask me what it is every five minutes until you get here.”
“Good. That’s the point. I’ll be there in about two hours. Traffic’s not bad.”
I hung up smiling. The apartment felt lighter than it had in months.
I cooked dinner for Emma and me, simple pasta with garlic and tomatoes, and let her help stir the sauce because she insisted she was old enough to use the big spoon.
The kitchen smelled warm and safe, and Emma chattered about dinosaurs and castles and whether Sir Chomps-a-Lot (the stuffed dinosaur Dollie had sent her last Christmas) would like pasta or pizza better.
After dinner, I washed the dishes while Emma sat at the kitchen table with her crayons, drawing a portrait of Sir Chomps-a-Lot that was mostly green scribbles with teeth.
I was humming to myself, thinking about Dollie arriving, thinking about wine and laughter and a weekend that felt like the first good thing in a long time.
Then Emma’s voice cut through the quiet. Casual. Curious. The way only a child can be when they have no idea what they’re looking at.
“Mama, why did that car stop in front of our house?”
My blood went cold.
I moved to the window. A black SUV, parked directly across the street, engine still running. Three men in dark clothes stepping out. One of them looked up at our window. He wasn’t trying to hide it. He wanted me to see him.
Jonathan’s men.
The divorce was final. The restraining order was in effect. None of that mattered to a man whose father owned half the city and whose ego could not survive the humiliation of being left by a kindergarten teacher from a mountain town.
My hands were shaking. My heart was slamming against my ribs so hard I could feel it in my throat.
But my voice, when it came out, was calm.
A kindergarten teacher’s calm, the kind I’d perfected over years of handling tantrums and bloody noses and fire drills.
Steady and measured and completely at odds with the tsunami of adrenaline flooding my system.
“Emma, baby. Come here. Bring Sir Chomps-a-Lot.”
Emma looked at my face. She was six years old, but she had the intuition of a child who had learned too young to read the weather in her mother’s eyes. She didn’t ask questions. She didn’t protest. She slid off her chair, picked up the stuffed dinosaur, and took my hand.
I grabbed my keys, my phone, and Emma’s jacket from the hook by the door. The front was not an option. The men were already on the sidewalk, and I could hear footsteps on the building’s front stairs.
Back door. Now.
I pulled Emma through the kitchen, down the narrow hallway, out the door that opened into the alley behind the building.
The night air hit us, cold and sharp, and the darkness swallowed us whole.
I held Emma’s hand tight and walked fast, my eyes scanning every shadow, every parked car, every flicker of movement in my peripheral vision.