Chapter 13 #2
Emma was quiet. Her small legs worked hard to keep up, Sir Chomps-a-Lot bouncing against her chest with every step.
She didn’t ask where we were going. She didn’t cry.
She just held my hand and trusted me to take her somewhere safe, and the weight of that trust was heavier than anything Jonathan Perry had ever put on my shoulders.
We cut through the neighbor’s yard, past the dumpsters, across the side street. My heart was hammering so loud I could hear it in my ears, louder than our footsteps, louder than the distant hum of traffic, louder than the voice in my head that was screaming run, run, run.
I fumbled for my phone with my free hand and called Dollie. She picked up on the first ring.
“Hey, I’m about forty minutes out. Tell Emma that Auntie Dee has the biggest surprise ever and she’s going to…”
“Dollie.” My voice cracked. Just her name, just the one word, and she heard everything in it.
The playful tone vanished. “What happened. Where are you.”
“Jonathan’s men. They’re at the apartment. I’m on foot with Emma. We went out the back. I don’t have my car, they blocked it in.”
“Where are you right now. Exactly.”
I looked around. The side street behind the grocery store, two blocks east of our building. I told her.
“Stay there. Don’t move. I’m rerouting now. I’ll be there in thirty minutes. Chloe, listen to me. Find somewhere to wait that’s not out in the open. A store, a gas station, anywhere with lights and people. Can you do that?”
“Yes.”
“I’m coming. Don’t hang up.”
I didn’t hang up. I held the phone to my ear with one hand and Emma’s hand with the other and walked three blocks to the 24-hour laundromat on Fifth Street.
The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead and the dryers hummed and the woman behind the counter didn’t look up from her magazine.
I sat Emma on the plastic bench, wrapped her jacket around her shoulders, and held Sir Chomps-a-Lot in her lap while she looked at me with those big green eyes.
“Mama, are we having an adventure?” she asked.
“Yes, baby. A big one.”
“Is Auntie Dee coming?”
“She’s coming right now.”
Emma nodded, satisfied, and leaned against my arm with the total trust of a child who believed her mother could fix anything.
I pressed my lips to the top of her head and listened to Dollie’s breathing on the phone, steady and fast, the sound of a woman driving as fast as she could on a dark highway.
Twenty-eight minutes later, headlights swept across the laundromat windows. Dollie’s car pulled up to the curb and she was out of the driver’s seat before the engine finished settling, her face white and fierce and already reaching for us.
“Get in,” she said. “Now.”
We piled in. Me in the back with Emma on my lap, Dollie behind the wheel. The car was moving before the doors were fully closed.
“Where?” Dollie asked, her hands steady on the wheel, her voice tight.
“Pinewood Ridge.”
She looked at me in the rearview mirror. I looked back. The silence between us held everything. Seven years of distance. A town I’d sworn I’d never go back to. A man in that town whose face I still saw when I closed my eyes. We both knew what I was asking. We both knew what going back meant.
“Okay,” she said. And drove.
The highway unspooled in front of us, dark and endless.
Emma fell asleep against my chest within the first twenty minutes, her arms wrapped around Sir Chomps-a-Lot, her breathing slow and trusting.
I held her and watched the mile markers pass and pressed my face into her hair and tried not to think about what was behind us or what was ahead.
Dollie didn’t play music. She didn’t make conversation. She just drove, steady and sure, the way she did everything, and every few minutes she reached back without looking and squeezed my knee. I’m here. I’m here. I’m here.
Three and a half hours later, the mountains appeared.
Dark shapes against a darker sky, rising out of the earth like the walls of a fortress.
The road curved and climbed and the air coming through the cracked window was sharp and clean and smelled like pine and cold water and something that my body recognized before my brain did.
Home.
Pinewood Ridge. Seven years since I’d left this town with my heart in pieces and my mother’s diagnosis in my pocket and a baby I didn’t know about yet growing inside me. Seven years since I’d driven this road in the opposite direction, crying so hard I could barely see the lines.
Dollie pulled up to her house, a small blue cottage on Elm Street that she and Josh had bought a few years back.
The porch light was on. Josh was standing in the doorway, because of course Dollie had called him during the drive, and his face was concerned and confused and ready to help in whatever way was needed.
I got out of the car with Emma in my arms. She stirred but didn’t wake.
Her weight was warm against my chest, solid and real, and I held her tighter than I needed to because she was the reason I’d run and the reason I’d survived and the reason I was standing on this porch in a town I’d sworn I’d never return to.
Dollie was beside me before I reached the door. She put her arm around my shoulders and walked me inside, and the warmth of the house hit me like a wave, carrying the smell of coffee and cinnamon and the particular feeling of a place where someone was always glad to see you.
“You’re safe,” Dollie said, pulling me into a hug that was fierce and tight and shaking with the emotion she’d been holding together since my phone call. “You hear me? You’re safe now. Both of you.”
I broke.
The tears came fast and hard, the kind that had been stored up behind dams of composure and kindergarten-teacher calm for years.
I held my daughter in one arm and pressed my face into Dollie’s shoulder and cried with the quiet, exhausted sobs of a woman who had been running for too long and had finally found a place to stop.
“I’m so tired, Dollie,” I whispered, my voice cracking on her name.
“I’m so tired of running. I’m tired of looking over my shoulder every time I walk Emma to school.
I’m tired of checking the locks three times before bed.
I’m tired of being scared in my own apartment, in my own life.
I thought the divorce would end it. I thought the papers would make it stop.
But he won’t stop. He’s never going to stop. ”
The sobs came harder, shaking my whole body, and Dollie held on tighter.
“I just want to feel safe,” I said. “I just want my daughter to feel safe. I don’t know how to do this anymore. I don’t know where to go. I don’t know how many more times I can grab her in the dark and run.”
“Then stop running,” Dollie said, her voice fierce and steady and thick with tears of her own.
Her hand rubbed circles on my back, the same way I rubbed Emma’s back when she had nightmares.
“You stop running because you’re here now.
You’re home. You’re staying with us. For as long as you need. End of discussion.”
Josh appeared with a glass of water and a blanket, setting them on the couch without a word, then retreating to give us space with the quiet competence of a man who understood that sometimes the best thing you could do was be useful and invisible.
“Come on,” Dollie said, easing back to look at my face. She wiped my cheeks with her thumbs, the way a mother would, the way I wiped Emma’s. “Let’s get this little one to bed.”
I carried Emma to the guest room, laid her on the bed, tucked Sir Chomps-a-Lot under her arm, and pulled the quilt up to her chin.
She shifted in her sleep, her small hand finding the dinosaur’s ear and holding on, and her face in the lamplight was peaceful and trusting in the way that only children can be, completely sure that the adults in their life will keep the monsters away.
I kissed her forehead.
“We’re going to be okay,” I whispered to her sleeping face.
I stood in the doorway and watched her breathe for a long time. Then I turned off the lamp and went back to the living room, where Dollie was waiting on the couch with wine and the kind of silence that didn’t need filling.
Pinewood Ridge. The town I’d fled. The town where everything had started and everything had ended and where, apparently, everything was about to start again.
I sat beside Dollie, took the wine she offered, and let myself feel, for the first time in years, something that wasn’t fear.
It felt like hope. Fragile and unfamiliar and terrifying.
But it was there.