Chapter 35
NICOLA
It seems like weeks since I’ve felt the sun on my face.
Even though the morning is cold and drizzly, I sit in Paige’s back garden under a covered awning and watch Avery as she sits on a blanket and bounces, smiling at me and looking around, mesmerized by the bird and squirrel sounds.
Grant left for the restaurant early, but this morning I was able to meet him finally, properly, and he and Paige seemed.
..cozy. Paige is showering before we take a trip to town to buy some clothes and get lunch.
Lunch out. It seems like such a simple thing, but I literally have no recollection of the last time I experienced that.
I feel elated. I know it’s not over, but I am a little more than cautiously optimistic.
And then, just as Avery looks up at me, flexing her little hands inside the knitted mittens I’ve dressed her in, I feel a sharp explosion of pain on the side of my head, and the world goes black.
Only for a moment, though, because then I see him.
Through the blur and colors behind my eyes, I see him standing over me.
I scream for Avery, but he leaves her outside as he drags me in by one arm, my body limp against the ground as he pulls me over the threshold and into the adjacent kitchen.
The metal runner cuts my side as he pulls me through.
God, he wants to bring me somewhere where nobody will hear what he’s about to do.
I open my mouth to scream again, but he quickly covers it. He has duct tape. I see the kitchen drawer ajar. Is he prepared for this? Did he grab it out of desperation or is this rage-induced and he has no real plan? I don’t know which is worse.
My pulse hammers against my skull, and I try to hold my arms behind my back, keeping them from him so he can’t bind them. I lie on the cold tile just inside the sliding glass doors. I can hear Avery screaming, crying, and my heart breaks.
“You really thought you’d get away with all this?
” he says, hovering over me, a smirk on his face.
All I can hear is my baby, and I heave my hips up and kick my right leg as high as I can, landing on his jaw.
It knocks him back; he falls to his knees, and I’m able to scramble up.
I run to the opposite side of the kitchen island and rip the tape off my mouth.
It’s not far, but I can’t leave her alone.
I hear her cry again, and I scream, “What do you want from me?”
“I gave you everything! Look at that house. Look at all I gave you. You were never grateful. You only complained,” he says. Tears roll down my face, and I shakily pick up a carving knife from the counter. I can barely hold it steady, and he laughs. He walks slowly to me, thinking I won’t use it.
“I saw you. Looking down at me, thinking you won,” he says, laughing. He saw me in the window. This is my fault. I wasn’t careful enough.
I hold the knife out with my shaky right hand as he creeps closer, smiling at me.
I back up, but then he lunges so quickly I don’t see it coming, and he takes hold of the handle.
He holds it to my neck. I look out the glass doors at my baby.
Her face is red and swollen, and she’s crying so hard she’s shaking.
The dull blade presses into my flesh, and I can feel it break the skin.
“What do you want? Tell me, and I’ll do it,” I say in a hoarse whisper.
“Tell them you lied,” he says. I realize he doesn’t know about Avery yet. I haven’t given up that big piece of the puzzle to prove his motive quite yet, so in his mind, it’s just the abuse, and a hit-and-run he knows he didn’t do. Does he think this will go away if I agree? If I say it’s not true?
“Okay,” I agree in a whimper.
“It was all part of your fantasy, fetish shit. We scream. We play kidnapper and victim. Whatever the fuck you gotta say. I told you, goddamn it, so many times, that no matter what you did, it would always end up like this. You got me good, Georgia, you sure did, but this will still end the way it’s supposed to. ”
“Okay,” I say again, choking back my screams for Avery. “Just tell me what to do.”
“We’re going home.” He lets the knife fall loose in his hand and faces me.
“You’ll call the police and tell them you lied.
That you—” and then I grab the knife while his guard is down, and even though it’s not very big, I push it as hard as I can in the first place I can.
I don’t aim, I just close my eyes and hope he doesn’t get hold of the knife before I can somehow hurt him first. It plunges into his left shoulder.
He grabs at the knife with his right hand, trying to pull it out, howling in pain.
“You fucking bitch!” he screams. I don’t know whether it’s safer to go and grab Avery or leave her as far away from this as possible even though she’s terrified.
I decide I need to get her. What if he does know the truth about her?
What if he would hurt her to spite me either way?
I can’t risk it. I can better protect her if she’s close.
While he’s doubled over on the ground, trying to pull the knife out of his flesh, I run and pull Avery into my arms. I think the best thing to do is to try to run toward Cora’s house—at least be out in the street where someone can see us.
But before I make it out of the yard, there is a hard yank in the back of my head.
He has me by the hair. It’s twisted into his fist, and he controls my every movement with his tight grip on the back of my scalp.
“You will never outsmart me. You were a fucking waitress when you met me, so don’t think for one minute you are capable of winning this,” he hisses in my ear as he pushes me back inside, out of sight.
I hear a noise upstairs. Paige! But he hears it, too.
He looks up. He looks surprised. He’s so careful.
He knows Grant doesn’t live here. Maybe he waited until he saw a car pull out of the drive this morning, assumed it was hers, was sure I was alone, and now he doesn’t know. He looks to me and then up again.
“What is that?” he spits, holding my hair so tight I can feel parts ripping out.
“The dog,” I say, hoping the tone in my voice sounds convincing and not hopeful that there is help coming.
“We’re going. Now,” he says. His shoulder is dripping blood on the ivory-tiled floor, and he holds the knife, sticky with blood, shakily in his hand. If he gets me in that house, I know it’s over. No one can save me. I’ll never get out. I know that with everything I have in me.
“We’re gonna walk home. Now. Got it? Pull any shit, and I have no problem pushing this into a kidney,” he says, looking at the knife. “I may go down, but at least you won’t have Avery,” he says, and I lose my breath.
The pain and the smell of his breath in my face as he spits threats are familiar as rain, but no matter how many times I find myself here, I still will never understand the sick mind of someone like him.
Why he needs absolute command over someone to fulfill a fantasy.
I always thought it could have been anyone he targeted at that resort that day.
If it were anyone else, maybe I’d be free.
But he’d rather go to prison forever just to hurt me—just to make sure I was separated from the only person I love. He’s an absolute monster.
“Okay,” I say, “we’ll go. We want to go,” and he nods to the open sliding doors. I hold sobbing Avery against my chest and take a step outside. He follows behind, the knife against the skin between my shoulder blades.
All of a sudden, we hear sirens, and he stops in his tracks.
They’re distant. Maybe headed this way, maybe not, but that moment of hesitation gives me an opening.
He’s dropped his arm and is looking up. His guard is down.
I turn and dart past him as he looks over the fence to see if they’re close.
I run inside the glass doors, slamming them shut and locking them behind me.
I try to catch my breath. I can’t tell if it’s me or Avery howling, but I put her down on a chair so I can breathe.
I hunch over with my palms on my knees and try to calm myself enough to think.
He could kick that glass in any second, but I need to breathe first. I just need to—
And then I see Paige walking down the stairs in a bathrobe with her wet hair plastered to the sides of her face, carrying a shotgun.
I see Lucas see her. She walks right past me, and Avery screams as the sirens shriek, getting closer and closer and hurting her ears.
Lucas stops kicking the glass door when Paige aims the shotgun at it, but he laughs when he takes her in.
“You that little bitch who broke into my house?” He snorts.
The look on his face goes from mockery to fear when Paige flings open the glass doors and aims the barrel of the gun at him.
She walks out into her yard slowly, keeping her aim.
He backs up and stumbles over a rosebush but then regains his composure and starts to run.
When I see Paige move closer to him as he runs away, I don’t know what she’ll do.
“The police are coming!” I say. She can’t shoot a man in the back.
But then he trips on a low row of barbed wire around the lettuce meant to keep rabbits away.
He falls and bloodies his shins. When he gets up, he’s facing Paige.
She stands near her beloved Adirondack chairs with the gun pointing at Lucas, his hands held up in surrender.
“Okay! Fuck!” is all he says. The police will be here in seconds, and she can hold him there until they arrive.
She looks back at me and Avery, who’s still screaming and red in the face.
She turns to Lucas, and without one word, she pulls the trigger.
A spot of red blooms on his chest and expands, and then he falls to the ground, soundlessly.
Paige holds the gun still in her outstretched hands, and I see her whole body shake uncontrollably. I look at Lucas’s body, still and lifeless. I hear Avery’s cries and the sirens so close now. Are they coming to us? How? It’s so loud. Paige doesn’t move. I think she’s in shock.
She’s saved me. He can never come back now.
I hear car doors slam and the sirens stop.
Cora’s voice is calling my name. She’s banging on the front door.
It’s happening so fast and in slow motion at the same time.
I see a drop of blood fall onto the back of my hand, and I reach up to touch the gash on my head from that first blow Lucas gave me.
No one can know he had tried to flee and had his hands up when he was shot.
This was self-defense. They’ll see me and know it was.
He came for me, and I need to finish this.
I take the gun from Paige. She doesn’t move to stop me, she just stares at the dead body.
I hold it in my trembling hands and point it down at his body just as police officers, followed by a distraught Cora, push their way through the brush at the side of the house and into the back garden.
Once they see me with the gun, they draw theirs out of caution, but I drop it immediately and fall to my knees.
Paige rushes to my side and puts her arms around me. I know they will separate us to ask questions, so I grip her hand tightly and look in her eyes. “I shot him. I had to.” She gives a slight nod of her head and squeezes my hand back.
“You had to,” she agrees.
“It’s over,” I say again and again, on my hands and knees in the muddy earth. “It’s over.”