Chapter 3 Noah
Noah
Emma started to calm as we reached the garage. I drove right into the open bay and cut the engine. We sat there for another few minutes until her tears abated, and then I stood, holding her bridal-style, and headed toward my truck.
“I can probably walk,” she said.
“The fact that you’re not a hundred percent sure about that means you’re getting carried.”
I got her settled into the passenger seat and then headed over to my side to start the engine and crank the heat. Yes, we were in a bit of a warm spell, but it was still only fifty degrees, and Emma’s skin felt freezing. I’d rather continue sweating through my shirt than watch her shiver.
I threw the truck in reverse and called my dad as I started backing out.
“You headed over here for dinner?” he said by way of answering, his gravelly voice rough and familiar.
“No, Dad. Emma’s alive,” I told him.
The line went dead.
I called him back, yelling, “Don’t hang up!” when he answered, and this time, he listened while I got the whole story out.
“You’re not messing with me?” he said.
“He’s not,” Emma answered him in a quavering voice.
Dad swore. “I’ll walk over now. And don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone.”
I thanked him and got off the line. My parents lived on the property, in a renovated caretaker’s cottage just beyond the back fence.
They had their own little clearing out there, bordered by the forest, Mom having just enough space for a decent-size garden and her own little apiary.
Nights like tonight, when I worked late, I usually stopped by for dinner before heading home because Mom insisted, doubting my ability to feed myself even though she’d done a damn fine job teaching me how to cook.
“I’m gonna take the back way to my place,” I warned Emma. “Just to be safe. If we pass anyone, duck down.”
“I will.”
Thibodeaux was a postage-stamp-size town.
With a population of just under three thousand, everyone knew everyone here.
And everyone’s business. My truck was an older-model Ford that Dad handed down to me when I got my license, and I’d been maintaining it ever since.
It was lifted, painted a deep hunter green, and was loud because it was diesel.
Meaning, people knew it was my truck, and because I hadn’t dated anyone since me and Maisie called it quits six months ago, all it would take to get the rumor mill started was someone seeing me drive past with a blond woman in the passenger seat.
“What happened to me . . . after?” Emma asked.
I glanced over at her as we passed beneath a streetlight, and, man, she was beautiful, even splotchy from crying, caked in dirt, and visibly exhausted and terrified.
Beau Broadturn was a goddamn idiot. And a fucking asshole.
The last thing I wanted was to hurt this woman any more than she already was, but she deserved to know the full truth of what he had put her and her family through.
“It ain’t a pretty story,” I warned her. “You ready to hear it now, or do you want to wait until you’ve recovered a little bit?”
She huffed a humorless laugh. “I don’t think there’s any recovering from this.”
I reached out before I could think better of it, my hand landing on her shoulder, squeezing. “If anyone can recover from this, it’s you, Emma.”
Her chin wobbled, and her eyes grew glassy. “Thank you. I . . . I think I’d like to hear the story now.”
I gave her one more squeeze and released her, returning my focus to the road because it was late, and these backwoods had a lot of deer in them.
“Well, Beau had complete control over you from the start. Had you brought right over to the hospital without telling anyone there’d even been an accident.
Your mama didn’t find out until the next day.
She and you were supposed to have lunch, she said, and she kept getting your voicemail.
Beau wasn’t answering her calls or texts, so she finally went to the police station to have them do a welfare check, and that’s when Ben Broadturn let it slip that you were in a coma. ”
Emma tipped back against the headrest, her eyes closed. “Oh, Mama.”
“She was furious,” I said. “Went straight to the hospital to try and see you, but Beau said you were in too critical a condition for visitors. He gave her and your dad the runaround for another day before they forced their way in. Even then, they couldn’t do much.
Beau was your medical power of attorney, your husband, and a doctor.
He had the ultimate control over you, and he wouldn’t listen to anyone else when they wanted to bring in outside specialists for a second opinion. ”
Emma made a low, angry sound. “That son of a bitch.”
“Your dad tried to file a conflict-of-interest complaint with the hospital, but as you know, Beau’s dad is the head of the hospital, and he declined it.
I think your parents were trying to go over his head to the state health-care commission, but bureaucratic bullshit slowed it down, and by that point, Beau had already ruled you brain dead. ”
“Clearly, I am,” she snarked.
“He, um . . .” Fuck, how to tell her this? “He didn’t give your parents a chance to say goodbye before he pulled the plug.”
Her hands fisted, all the warning I had before she leaned forward in her seat and screamed.
It was bloodcurdling, hair-raising, a sound torn straight from hell.
Thank god no one else was on the road with us because it caught me off guard so bad I jerked away from her.
We briefly swerved into the oncoming lane before I managed to straighten us out.
“I’m going to fucking kill him,” she seethed.
“Not to toot my own horn, but I am pretty good at disposing of bodies.”
She turned my way. “Be careful about offering to help, because I’m dead serious. Do you know, I think he might have been trying to kill me for months?”
My hand tightened on the steering wheel. “What?”
“Even before the fall, I hadn’t been doing well,” she said.
“I’d been sick for, like, half a year, and just kept getting worse with all these strange symptoms that Beau claimed he couldn’t figure out.
He had me convinced it was some sort of autoimmune disease.
The weird thing is, he went away for a week to a medical conference, and while he was gone, I started to feel better.
When he got home, the symptoms got worse again.
Looking back, I think he could have been the one making me sick, like giving me something, but at the time, I figured it was stress-triggered because our marriage .
. . wasn’t going well. Not just with the cheating rumors, but—god, this is so embarrassing to say out loud—he hadn’t touched me in months.
Even if I begged him to. He blamed it on the sickness, but I’d also been gaining weight, and he had opinions about that.
” She buried her head in her hands. “Oh, Jesus, I can’t believe I just said that.
I’m so sorry. We haven’t spoken since high school, and here I am oversharing about my sex life. ”
I tried to shove my rage at Beau down and control my tone, but it was impossible. “We’ve trauma bonded,” I said. “The normal bounds of conversation no longer apply. Also? Beau is a fucking bastard. He should have been the one begging you. Christ, didn’t he realize what he had?”
She went quiet, and I wanted to kick myself because I’d probably crossed some kind of line, but goddamn, it couldn’t be helped. I wanted to kill Beau myself, not just for hurting Emma physically, but for the emotional damage he’d clearly done to her as well.
“Do you really mean that?” she asked in a small voice.
I shot her a look like she was crazy, because, hello?
“You’re the most beautiful woman in the tri-county area, and if a man doesn’t make you feel like that every second of your life, then they don’t deserve to even stand in your presence.
And I’m not just talking about your appearance.
You got a beautiful soul, too, Emma Miller. ”
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“You’re welcome.”
I flicked on my blinker, turning down the dusty road that led home.
“You know the craziest part of all of this?” she said.
I shook my head. There were too many options to choose from.
“I literally just crawled out of a coffin, and I feel better than I have in recent memory. If I really had that traumatic of a brain injury, if I was really in a coma, shouldn’t I, I don’t know, be all messed up from that?
Instead, I feel fine. Well rested, even.
Like I just woke up from a great night of sleep.
I mean, I also feel weak as hell, because I’ve been immobile for . . .” She looked at me in question.
“Including the time you were comatose, six days, give or take.”
She nodded. “And yet I’m weirdly energized. Mentally, I feel more like myself, too. I don’t have that awful brain fog I was experiencing in the months leading up to the fall. Everything’s clearer, and I am so much more alert, so present and aware of everything around me.”
I sent her a sideways look. “Any sudden aversion to garlic? Urges to drink my blood?”
She slapped my arm. “I’m not a vampire.”
I snorted. “That’s exactly what a vampire would say.”
“Noah.”
“Sorry, I’ve worked around the dead for so long that my humor has skewed a little morbid.” A glance sideways showed her shaking her head at me. “In all seriousness, do you think Beau might have medically induced your coma or something?”
“It seems possible. He had access to everything he needed. Plus, the constant control, not letting anyone else look at me? That’s so suspicious.”
My head spun. “Which means he would have known you weren’t really brain dead. So what did he do? Poison you right before pulling the plug and fuck up the dosage, so you lived?”
“Wouldn’t I be showing signs of being poisoned? I don’t even feel nauseous.”
“Well, then he could have . . .” The sentence stalled out as my brain caught up to my mouth. No. It was too awful to say out loud, let alone contemplate.
“What?” Emma asked.
I shook my head.
“Just say it.”
I shook my head harder.
“Noah, say it.”
“Fuck.” I dragged a hand over my face. “I am really sorry for even going here, but he had control over you after you died, too. You went straight from the family-owned hospital to the family-owned mortuary, and Beau went with you every step of the way because he claimed he couldn’t stomach the thought of anyone else handling his wife.
What if he kept you in an induced coma the whole time?
The funeral was closed casket, despite how hard your parents pushed to see you one last time.
He even rode with you in the back of the hearse.
What if all that control and coercion was so no one was there to witness him administering drugs?
What if the plan was to keep you out until you were buried, where he believed you’d just quietly suffocate to death in your sleep?
Typically, there’s only enough oxygen in a grave for an hour or two of life, and he had to know that.
The fact that you managed to stay alive for at least eight is a goddamn miracle.
That’s why I begged you to stay calm. I was worried if you kept breathing hard, you’d burn through your air supply faster. ”
Beside me, she curled in on herself, starting to cry again.
Damn it, I always did this. Always made it worse.
I leaned over and undid her seat belt—my house was only a few hundred feet away—and dragged her across the bench seat. She didn’t fight me, collapsing into my side instead.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said any of that.”
“No, don’t apologize,” she said between sniffles. “I needed to hear it. And I think you might be right. God, what do I do, Noah?”
I cranked the wheel with one hand, turning into my driveway.
“Fucked if I know. Take it in steps, I guess? First one, we get you inside and into the shower. I got plenty of spare clothes for you to wear. Then we can worry about getting you fed. After that, we’ll figure out what comes next.
Just know that you’re more than welcome to hide out at my place for as long as you like.
My nearest neighbor is Mike Green half a mile back the way we came, and that old coot sticks to himself.
No one will bother you out here, especially because, well . . .”
“They all think I’m dead,” she finished for me.