Chapter 34
THIRTY-FOUR
LENNON
For one impossible second, I can only stare at Jake as he runs toward the cruiser with his hands in the air screaming for help.
Even with blood smeared over his mouth and mud up one side of his shirt, after stealing August’s truck and dragging me into another nightmare I had to crash my way out of, he still knows exactly how to shapeshift into the perfect victim for an audience.
He limps, as if wounded more gravely than he is. He trembles like he’s afraid, but reasonable, and brave enough to ask for help.
My husband, the eternal victim.
The first cruiser fishtails a little as it turns in from the road, blue and red lights washing over the ditch. A second set of lights sweeps in behind it, brighter and harsher, cutting through the mud-dark until the whole world has turned into a red and blue disco.
The gas station alarm is still shrieking from where Jake tore away from the pump.
Somewhere near the store, the clerk has stopped walking toward us and is holding his phone out with both hands.
I don’t know if he’s still talking to the 911 receptionist, filming, or both.
I hope both. I hope the whole damn universe is filming.
August stands beside me in the ditch, breathing hard.
His hand is still in mine.
Blood shines across his knuckles. His or Jake’s, or maybe even mine? I don’t know anymore. The night is made of mud and sirens and the smell of gasoline, and every part of me is shaking. But August’s fingers close around mine like an anchor.
The cruiser doors fly open.
“Get on the ground!” a male officer shouts.
Jake drops immediately to his knees in the mud, hands still up, perfect as a repentant in a church painting.
August lets go of my hand because he knows what they’re seeing.
Big man with tattoos and blood on his fists. While another man with a bloody face is on the ground screaming for help.
August lifts his hands slowly, palms out, and there’s something so practiced in the movement that my heart breaks through the rage for one sharp second.
How many times has he had to make himself harmless for people who already decided he wasn’t?
“Don’t,” I say, my voice barely making it past my throat.
August’s eyes flick to mine. I see how afraid he is, because he knows how this story usually goes. He’s been trapped in it his whole life.
“Ma’am, step back!” the male officer shouts.
No.
No, absolutely not.
I have stepped back enough.
I have backed out of rooms, and backed down in arguments.
I have questioned my own memory because Jake stood there so calm and everyone else looked so uncomfortable. It’s always felt easier to question my reality than to force anyone to choose between us.
But never again.
The male officer moves toward August, one hand hovering near his belt, eyes locked on August’s bloody knuckles.
“Don’t touch him,” I shout.
He glances at me like I am another hazard on the scene. “Ma’am, I need you to move back.”
“Jake kidnapped me. The man on his knees closest to you. He’s my husband.”
Jake makes a wounded sound from the pavement.
“My wife hit her head,” Jake tells the officers. “She’s confused. My brother attacked me. He’s mentally ill.”
There it is.
The story he has always told best: his hysterical wife and his unstable brother, both of us too damaged to be believed.
August raises his hands, making himself harmless for people who have already decided he isn’t.
For ten years, I have stepped backward whenever Jake began rewriting reality.
Not this time.
“Don’t touch him,” I shout. “My husband kidnapped me, poisoned me, and now he is trying to use his brother’s diagnosis to make you ignore everything I say.”
Jake taught us both to doubt ourselves.
He made one mistake.
He put us in the same story, and now neither of us has to stand against him alone.
A female officer steps out of the second cruiser.
She’s shorter than her partner, with her dark hair twisted into a knot at the back of her head.
She keeps one hand low near her flashlight, and her eyes dart back and forth over the scene, taking in Jake on his knees.
August. My bare muddy legs. Then the truck, including the broken gas hose still sticking out of the gas tank, which I note her eyes stopping on.
Also the airbag sagging through the passenger window.
Then she looks at me. Really looks, and not through me, or around me toward the man explaining how confused I am, but at me.
“What’s your name?” she calls.
“Lennon Gallagher.”
My married name tastes like rust.
Jake twists toward her. “Officer, that’s my wife. I was trying to get her away from my brother. He’s unstable. He’s been stalking us and this isn’t the first time he’s attacked me. I had to call the cops on him just a few weeks ago!”
The female officer doesn’t look away from me.
“Lennon,” she says, “are you injured?”
“Yes,” I say. “And I’ve been poisoned.”
Jake lets out a soft, devastated laugh. “Baby.”
Not loud. Not cruel.
That’s the thing about him. He never starts cruel when other people can hear. He starts gentle. Concerned. Patient enough to make my panic look like proof.
“Listen to yourself,” he says. “You need to rest and see a doctor about your head wound. You’re not making sense.”
For ten years, I have lived inside the story he tells best.
Lennon is tired.
Lennon is emotional.
Lennon gets migraines.
Lennon isn’t thinking clearly.
Lennon needs me.
And here we are again, in the mud and the dark, with police lights cutting my face into red and blue pieces while my husband tries to hand the world another version of me.
The old, panicky urge to make myself easier to believe rises in me. Maybe if I lower my voice or try to explain more calmly, I can prove I deserve to be heard. I just have to come across less furious.
Except for the fact that I am furious. I’m pissed.
I am bloody and poisoned and standing in a ditch because I had to crash a truck to keep my husband from kidnapping me.
If that’s too much for the room, frankly, then the room can fucking choke on it.
“My husband has been poisoning my coffee with contaminated coin polish,” I say, louder. “My brother-in-law was taking me to a hospital when Jake tracked us down, stole August’s truck, kidnapped me, and tried to drive away with me in it.”
The male officer gives the female officer a look.
She ignores him.
Jake shakes his head with an expression so painfully tender I could vomit.
“She’s been delusional ever since she found my coin cleaner in the garage.
She’s been under a lot of stress and we’re trying to get a diagnosis for Bipolar Disorder.
We’ve had marital issues, but my brother’s been feeding into her manic paranoid delusions. ”
August’s hands flex in the air.
I step in front of him before he can punch Jake again.
The mud sucks at my shoes, and for a second the ground tilts so hard I nearly go down. August’s hand catches my elbow, steadying me. The male officer barks something about stepping apart, but the woman lifts one hand.
“Hold,” she says.
One word, but one everyone listens to.
The female officer steps closer to the ditch, flashlight lowered so it isn’t blinding me.
“I’m Officer Trevino,” she says. “I’m listening. Tell me the part I need to know right now.”
I almost break right there. When Jake tells a story, people usually only ask if I might have misunderstood. They ask if I’m tired, or hormonal, or stressed, or not feeling like myself.
No one ever looks me in the eye while Jake is standing right there and asks for the truth like it might belong to me alone.
I swallow hard, then say, legs shaking from the effort of standing up, “I have proof.”
Jake’s mouth curves.
“Honey, we’ve been over this. The phone got a virus. Whatever was or wasn’t on it, we had to do a factory restart—”
The phone is still in my hand, it’s true. Mud has dried around the edges of the case, and my thumb leaves a brown smear across the white setup screen. Hello, it still says, cheerful and blank as a stranger.
A laugh comes out of me.
It sounds half-feral, and Jake flinches before he can hide it.
“No,” I say. “No, you don’t get it.”
Officer Trevino’s eyes sharpen. “What do you mean?”
“It’s already online. I posted it on my insta before I ever left the house. Before he could wipe the phone.”
Jake stops breathing.
I see it. August sees it too, because his hand tightens around my elbow.
“It’s on my business Instagram,” I say. “Public account. I posted it before I left. He wiped my phone, but he didn’t wipe that. Anyone with a device can find it.” I give Officer Trevino my insta handle.
Trevino reaches for her phone.
Her partner shifts. “Trevino.”
“What? I’m checking a public post,” she says, eyes still on me. “These are immediate safety claims I need to verify. I’m not collecting evidence on my personal device.”
Jake rises a little from his knees. “Officer, she’s manipulating—”
“Stay where you are,” Trevino snaps.
The command hits him hard, and he flinches.
For the first time all night, Jake obeys without making it look like virtue.
Officer Trevino opens Instagram. Her thumbs move fast.
“What’s the account?”
I repeat the account details to her.
The clerk at the edge of the parking lot inches closer, still filming. The broken gas hose dangles from the pump behind him. A thin, chemical stink hangs over everything.
Officer Trevino finds the profile.
I know the exact second she sees the video because her face goes still.
“What am I looking at?” she asks.
“My kitchen,” I say. “From this morning.”
Jake makes a broken sound. “It’s a fake. One of those AI fakes!”
I don’t look at him.
I look at Officer Trevino.
Because this is the thing I never understood until this exact second: taking back my voice doesn’t mean convincing Jake to admit what he did.
It means turning away from him and speaking to someone else who can hear the truth and acknowledge reality. Of course August isn’t the only one.
“Play it,” I say.
Officer Trevino taps the screen.
The audio comes out tinny under the sirens and the alarm, but I still hear it.
The soft clink of cabinet hardware.
The faint rush of the air conditioner.
The scrape of the coffee canister sliding across the counter.
The camera angle is terrible because of how I had the phone set up. It catches the kitchen from the side: the coffee maker, the cabinet above it, and Jake from his nose down to his thigh as he moves into frame wearing the blue button-down I used to iron for him before church.
On the screen, he takes down the separate coffee canister.
The one labeled in his neat block letters: LENNON—LOW ACID.
A sound catches in August’s throat behind me.
Video Jake glances over his shoulder toward the hallway.
Then he opens the small metal tin I saw him using on the kitchen counter one day to scrub away at his old coin collection.
The one with the half-peeled imported label and bright silver coins on the front.
Is that how it happened the first time? Just an accident?
But then he realized he could do it again, to his advantage, if I ever got out of line.
He uses a tiny spoon to spoon out the smallest amount. Barely anything.
That makes it worse.
The care of it. The precision. The way he taps the spoon once against the rim before stirring it through the grounds like he is sweetening a cup of tea.
Then he closes the canister.
Wipes the counter.
Puts the tin away behind the cleaning supplies and washes his hands.
The video goes long enough for him to start the coffee maker and call down the hallway in the voice that used to make me feel safe: “Baby? I’m making your coffee.”
Officer Trevino lifts her eyes from the phone.
The night seems to hold its breath.
“It’s not what it looks like—” Jake starts to say, but I interrupt him.
“My hair is falling out,” I say.
I run my fingers through my hair and feel it give.
That is the only word for it.
Give.
A clump is left in my hand when I pull it away.
She reaches for the clip at her shoulder. “Dispatch, check status on EMS. We’ve got a female patient symptomatic from possible toxic exposure. Need medics expedited.”
Which is really, really good timing. Because right at that moment, all my determination to stay on my feet runs out, like the adrenaline push is over now that someone’s listened to me.
“Make sure the hospital runs tests,” I say, and then I collapse right where I’m standing.
Right before I hit the ground, with August screaming my name in the background, I have the thought—
Huh, well at least before I die, for once I got to stand right where I belonged: in the center of my own story.
And then the world goes dark.