Chapter 22
VIOLET
It’d been total chaos when I’d fled Chicago.
My hands were shaking as I stuffed clothes into a giant black contractor bag, Patrick screaming in the background. My phone was on the bed on speaker, Kylie’s voice on the other end.
“Just go. Forget the pictures, forget the sentimental stuff. I know it sucks, but this is your life we’re talking about.”
“But—”
“Clothes and bathroom stuff and that’s it. Just go.”
My second run, the one I’m doing now, is a little calmer. I have a plan this time, one I came up with the first week I arrived in New York.
That’s the part nobody tells you about running—how it’s not just a one-time thing. No, it’s a goddamn lifestyle. You run, then you have a plan to run again if needed.
Patrick's clothes are first. I pull open his dresser drawers and start pulling out shirts, pants, socks rolled into tight balls the way he likes them.
Then his favorite pajamas, the ones with little rockets.
Next, three pairs of underwear. Dragon goes in last, on top, because Patrick will want to see him when he opens the bag and I need something familiar waiting for him in whatever unfamiliar place we end up next.
My phone is pinned between my ear and my shoulder.
"Forty-eight hours," Kylie says. She's already typing—I can hear the rapid-fire clicking as she builds me yet another new life. "I can have a new identity ready for you by Monday. You’ll need to lay low until then, stop somewhere for the weekend.”
“Then where?” I’m watching my hands as I fold a few more of Patrick’s pants, noticing the quiver of my fingers.
“Further this time. Somewhere not in the northeast. Maybe the South—Charlotte, maybe, or Raleigh. Somewhere big enough to disappear but nowhere obvious."
"How much cash do I need?"
"How much do you have?"
"Maybe three thousand. I've been saving, but—"
"That'll get you there. I'll wire more once you're settled.
New social, new employment history, the works.
But Vi—" The typing stops. "This one has to be clean.
If he found you through Gianni's surveillance photos, he'll be looking for the same patterns.
You can't work in an office. You can't use the same kind of apartment. Everything has to change."
Everything has to change. Again. I’d just gotten used to Violet, just gotten used to New York. I think about Sunnyside, about Rudi, how I have to leave her without a word. And I think about Patrick and how I have to pull him from yet another school, make him start fresh again.
I drop onto Patrick’s bed. We’d been in a rush out the door this morning, so his dinosaur sheets are still tangled.
There's a crayon drawing on the nightstand of three stick figures, two big and one small, standing in front of a house with a triangle roof. He drew it last week. There’s no doubt who the third figure is—the shape taller than the ones for Patrick and me.
He hasn’t known Gianni for long, hasn’t spent much time around him at all. But the man made an impression.
The drawing makes my chest ache, tears forming in my eyes.
I can't do this again. I can't rip him out of another life, another home, another set of people he's just started to know. I can't watch him sleep in another strange room and pretend this is normal, that this is how people live and running is just something mamas and their babies do sometimes.
But Lance is here in New York, ready to finish what he started, and the last time I stayed too long, I woke up on a kitchen floor with my right eye swollen shut and an unspoken promise from the man who put it there that this was just the beginning.
I pack my bag next. Last to go in is my laptop—the manuscript is on there, all of it, every word I've written about a man who doesn't exist and a woman who's braver than me. Part of me wants to leave it. I imagine opening the laptop for the first time in another city, trying to write about the man who’s so obviously based on Gianni. I imagine just how it’ll feel, knowing I’ll never see him again.
I'm zipping the duffel when the buzzer goes.
My whole body locks. I stop breathing. My hand freezes on the zipper, and I stand perfectly still in my tiny apartment with two packed bags on the floor and my heart slamming against my ribs hard enough to crack them.
I check the intercom camera. It’s Gianni.
My finger hovers over the button to unlock the front door. I could just not answer, let him think I’m already gone. But I don’t. Instead, I press the button.
It doesn’t take much time at all before I hear his now-familiar heavy footfalls. The sound somehow brings both relief and anxiety all at once. I take one more breath, then open the door.
I say nothing at first when I lay eyes on him, his massive body nearly blocking the entire doorway. The expression on his face is hard to parse—I can’t tell if he’s mad or worried or what.
I move back and he steps inside. His eyes sweep the apartment—the bags on the floor, the open dresser drawers, the half-empty closet. He takes it all in with one look, and I watch his expression harden as he realizes what it all means.
"You're not running again," he says.
"You don't get to tell me what to do."
"Violet—"
"No." The anger is sudden and volcanic. "You don't get to send me away like I'm nothing and then show up at my apartment telling me what I can and can't do.
You dismissed me. In front of him. In front of everyone.
You looked right through me like the last month never happened, and now you're here, in my home, giving me orders? "
"I was protecting you."
"You were protecting yourself."
The words hit the air between us and hang there. His jaw tightens, but he doesn't argue. He lets me have it, and somehow that makes it worse, because I wanted him to fight back. I wanted him to give me a reason to stay angry. Being angry would be simple and easy.
"It's him," Gianni says quietly. "Dawson. He's the one you were running from."
I glare at him, trying to hold it together, hoping that projecting anger will stop him from seeing what’s underneath. I try to be the confident, sharp-tongued woman I know I am inside. But it’s no use. Gianni has a way of seeing through me, right to the goddamn core.
I can't hold it back any longer.
"I was twenty when I met him. He was an up-and-coming agent—charming, attentive, everything I thought I wanted. He love-bombed me into a marriage before I understood what was happening, and by the time I did, it was too late."
I sit down on the edge of the pull-out couch. My gaze flicks to the bags on the floor. The apartment somehow feels like it’s shrunk in half.
"He started hitting me after Patrick was born.”
Rage moves across Gianni’s face the instant I speak the words. There’s no doubt in my mind that if Lance were in the apartment at this moment, Gianni would snap his neck on the spot. Or worse.
“Tell me.”
“He started small—a shove here and there, a grabbed wrist that left marks.
He told me no one would believe me because he was FBI.
He told me he'd take Patrick, that he’d find me anywhere I went.
" I stare at my hands. "One night he hit me so hard it felt like my skin split. I don’t know what happened next. I think I fell back, bumped my head on the table.”
The rage appears on his face again. I half-expect him to calmly take out his phone and call Spackman and tell him Lance dies tonight. But he doesn’t. He pushes the anger aside and just listens.
“I came to eventually. Lance was telling Patrick that Mommy was napping, that she’d be fine. Then he said he was going to grow up to be just like Daddy." My voice breaks and I let it.
"I called Kylie the next morning. She had a plan ready in forty-eight hours. I filed abuse charges as a diversion—gave him something to deal with while I disappeared. I took Patrick, I took every dollar I'd hidden, and I left. Kylie erased Jessica. Built Violet. And I came here."
The silence is long and heavy, the kind you can feel pressing against your skin.
Then Gianni crosses the room and sits down beside me on the pull-out couch.
He puts his arm around me and pulls me against his chest, and I bury my face in the fabric of his henley and cry.
It’s not delicate or pretty. I cry the way you cry when you've been holding it in for fourteen months and you just can’t do it any longer.
He holds me through it, steady solid and immovable. His hand holds the back of my head and his chin rests on my hair. Gianni doesn’t shush me or tell me it’s okay or offer up any cliché. He just holds me, and it’s exactly what I need. Eventually, the tears slow.
When I finally pull back, I look at him with blurred, swollen eyes. His henley is smeared with tear stains, but he doesn’t say a word about that. Instead, he stands, offers me his hands. I take them and he guides me to my feet.
The expression on his face is hard and determined. I recognize right away what it means—he’s decided something.
"You and Patrick are moving in with me," he says. "Tonight."
"Gianni, I can't just—"
"Private entrance. Security detail. A room for Patrick with a lock on the door. You keep him enrolled at the pre-school if you want—my men will handle pickup and drop-off until this is resolved."
"You can't just decide—"
"It's decided, Violet."
"I didn't agree to this."
"I know."
He says it without apology—but without negotiation either. It’s spoken in the same way he speaks everything that matters, as if the outcome had already been decided and he’s merely letting me know out of some sense of courtesy.
I should fight harder. I should insist on my autonomy, my right to make my own decisions, my refusal to let another man dictate where I live and how I protect my son.
Every instinct I've built since Chicago is screaming that this is a pattern—a powerful man taking control, making choices for me, folding me into his world whether I want it or not.
But Lance is in New York, and Lance knows where I work. And there’s no doubt in my mind that Lance will know where I live within the next twenty-four hours, if he doesn’t already.
More importantly, Gianni isn't Lance. I know it in my bones, in my body, in the way he held me without speaking and sat on my terrible couch and didn't flinch at my tiny apartment or my lumpy mattress or the smallness and sadness of my life.
But the shape of it—a man deciding, a woman following—fits a mold I swore I'd never step into again. Yet, here I am about to do it, because I have no other goddamn options.
"Okay."
It's not a yes, but a surrender. And Gianni knows it. Thankfully, he doesn’t say a word. He just picks up both bags, holds the door open, and waits for me to walk through it.