25. Audrey
AUDREY
I frowned at my phone and walked carefully to the front door, not entirely trusting the text after what had happened with Dean.
But there was no way for Dean to know where I was, no way for him to have found me so fast.
I moved the eyelet curtains on the front window and saw Ridge leaning against the porch post, his black-and-red flannel shirt like a flag announcing his presence.
I opened the door and slipped outside, rubbing my arms — still bare under my sundress — against the chill in the air.
“How did you get my number?” I asked, keeping my voice down so I wouldn’t wake Ella.
“I’m pretty resourceful when I want to be.” He held up two beers. “Thought you could use one of these.”
I took the beer from his hand and we sat on the top step like we’d agreed to it in advance.
He clinked his bottle against mine. “To asshole exes getting what they deserve.”
I took a drink, let the cool beer work its way down my throat. “You followed me.”
“I’m not sorry.”
“That doesn’t make it okay,” I said.
“Still not sorry.”
“I can handle Dean.”
“You shouldn’t have to.” He took a drink of his beer. “I take it that wasn’t the first time he’s put his hands on you?”
I didn’t answer for a long time, but I was glad he didn’t rush to fill the silence. I’d never told anyone about Dean, about what had happened between us.
Not my parents, not my brother.
No one.
So why did I want to confess to this man I barely knew?
“He wasn’t always like that,” I said. “In the beginning, he was charming, funny, tender. My parents loved him. My brother too. He was exactly the kind of guy they’d always wanted for me — established, successful, stable.”
“He didn’t look so stable at the donut shop,” Ridge said.
I laughed even though the situation wasn’t exactly funny. “No, that came later. I moved out here to do my residency because of Dean’s family business.”
“And what’s Dean’s family business?”
“Transportation, distribution.” I didn’t look at him. It was easier to be honest when I didn’t have to look in his eyes. “They own a fleet of trucks, a couple cargo ships.”
“So you moved here for him, got married, stayed,” Ridge said.
“That pretty much covers it. And it wasn’t bad. He was a little more possessive once we were married, a little more controlling. But he told me it was just because he loved me so much.”
“And you believed him?” There was no condescension in Ridge’s tone. It was a genuine question seeking a genuine answer.
I looked out over the field, dark now, the fireflies gone.
“I didn’t know what to believe. I mentioned it to my parents once, but they kind of… brushed it off, said all marriages have trouble. Told me to compromise, communicate.”
I thought about my parents, happily married in Michigan, their biggest arguments over where to go on vacation every year and whose turn it was to unload the dishwasher.
“Can’t communicate with a fist when it’s coming your way,” Ridge said.
“You’re telling me.” I took a deep breath. “It got a little better while I was pregnant with Ella. He backed off a bit, was more solicitous, like he’d been in the beginning. But when I went back to work after she was born, it started up all over again, and it was worse than ever.”
“Did you think of leaving?” he asked. “Before you actually split, I mean.”
“Every day. But Dean’s family is wealthy around here, powerful. He told me he’d take Ella, that he’d make my life a living hell. And I have to say, he’s delivered on that last promise a good portion of the time.”
“Did he fight for full custody?”
“At first, but I managed to pull it out with a little sleuthing, a good lawyer that ate up my savings, and lots of people from the hospital attesting to my character. But…”
“You’re still walking the tightrope,” Ridge said.
“Yeah, and today didn’t help.”
“Still not sorry,” he said. “He’s lucky I let him keep the hand he had wrapped around your neck.”
“It’ll get uglier if he finds out I’m living here with you — with Graham and Holden — but I have ammunition of my own.”
“What kind of ammunition?”
Confession made me nervous, and I looked at the label on the beer just for something to do.
“Last spring, Ella mentioned a woman in a blue dress by a bluebird, someone with Dean who was crying and not allowed to talk.”
I felt Ridge go still next to me. “Not allowed to talk?”
“That’s what she said, that Dean had a woman with him, that she was crying and that she wasn’t allowed to talk. Those were her exact words.”
Goose bumps rose on my arms at the memory. My heart had practically stopped beating at the time, Ella’s innocent voice recounting something that sounded anything but innocent.
“Did you ask him about it?” Ridge asked.
“Not right away. Not until I found the stuff in the storage unit.”
“What stuff?”
“Ashcroft Distribution has a storage unit. Everything is in the cloud now, obviously, but they have paper records from before, and paper backup now. Dean’s dad is old school that way.
” I took another drink of beer, hoping to find the courage to continue in the bottle.
“Anyway, this was back when I still thought I had a chance of getting full custody of Ella. Dean made it clear that he would present the business as struggling to the court, that he would never pay me — never pay Ella — a dime. I knew he’d try and cook the books so he wouldn’t have to pay. ”
“So you went to the storage unit looking for the company’s real financials,” Ridge said.
“Exactly, and I found what I was looking for — which was part of how I managed to get fifty-fifty custody of Ella — but I found something else too.”
“What did you find?” I could feel Ridge’s gaze on my face, but I didn’t dare look at him, could hardly believe I was actually saying out loud all the things I’d been holding close and secret for over a year.
“There were boxes and boxes of… women’s things.”
“Women’s things?”
I could feel Ridge’s confusion, identified with it because it was exactly how I’d felt when the flashlight on my phone had landed on the boxes at the back of the storage unit.
“Clothing, shoes, handbags, jewelry…”
“I don’t get it.”
I turned to look at him for the first time since I’d started talking about Dean. “They weren’t new. They’d belonged to someone.”
I waited while Ridge processed the information.
“Are you saying you think Dean and his family are trafficking women through Ashcroft Distribution?”
I held his gaze. “I’m saying I know they are.”
“Tell me,” he said.
I liked that he didn’t scoff, didn’t make it seem like my suspicions were farfetched, didn’t make it seem like I was crazy.
“I confronted him,” I said. “I told him what I’d found, asked him what they were doing with all that stuff, asked him about the crying woman in the blue dress.”
“And?”
“He told me to mind my own business, told me I’d never asked questions when I was living on his money and I had no right to ask them now.
” My stomach turned when I thought about the next part, and I set down my beer and forced myself to tell Ridge the rest. “And then he told me that if I loved Ella, I’d shut my mouth, because he knew how to make girls disappear. ”
I didn’t realize I was shaking until Ridge reached for my hand. “You’ve been carrying this alone.”
“Who could I tell?”
His green eyes shone in the dark. “This is why you joined the Hunt.”
I nodded. “I wasn’t even sure I was going to go through with it if I won, wasn’t even sure I could go through with it. Dean is Ella’s father.”
“You don’t owe him anything, Audrey.” Ridge’s voice was hard.
“No, but I owe Ella everything.”
He sat with that for a minute, thinking about it.
Then he leaned in to kiss me, the gesture intimate and familiar, this time filled not with passion, but with a kind of caring that brought hot tears to my eyes.
I blinked them back when he pulled away. It had been a long time since I’d cried in front of anyone.
I wasn’t going to start now.
He looked into my eyes and reached up to stroke my cheek. “You’re not alone anymore.”
And as improbable as it seemed, for the first time in a long time, I felt like maybe he was right.