Chapter 27
I know I have to tell him before I actually decide to do it.
That’s how I know it’s real.
Not the abstract, floating kind of knowing that lets you push a hard thing off until later.
Not the version where you tell yourself you’ll handle it tomorrow, or next week, or when the timing is better and your nerves aren’t already stretched thin and your life doesn’t feel like it’s balanced on a blade.
No.
This lands lower than that. Harder. Sharper.
It sits in my chest all afternoon while Lexi plays with Amy and Casey in the common room and Gio grumbles his way through another game he’s absolutely losing on purpose but will deny to his grave.
It stays with me while Emma folds laundry at the kitchen table and Mac argues with Logan about something so ridiculous I lose the thread before I even bother following it.
It’s there when Joker passes through the room and his hand skims low over my back, casual enough not to draw attention, deliberate enough that my whole body lights up anyway.
It’s there because every time I look at him now, every time I catch the shape of him watching the room like he’s already measuring how fast he can break somebody if they move wrong near us, the same thought keeps rising.
Not telling him is becoming more dangerous than telling him. That should probably terrify me more than it does.
Because telling him means making it real in a way I haven’t let it be before.
It means saying the ugliest parts out loud.
It means taking things I have kept locked down inside myself and laying them in front of a man who already looks at me like he’s halfway to violence just from what little he knows now.
And if I tell Joker the full shape of Cal? If I tell him what kind of man my ex-husband really is?
There won’t be any putting that back in the box afterward.
The thought follows me until the sun starts dropping and the clubhouse settles into that late-afternoon stretch where everything feels warm and lived-in and deceptively safe.
Lexi is tired but happy, Bunny tucked under her arm while Amy helps her color at one of the tables.
Casey is explaining something to Jason with all the grave patience of a tiny dictator, and Gio is pretending not to care while hovering close enough to be clearly invested anyway.
I should be in the room with them. I am in the room with them, technically. But part of me is already moving toward something else.
Toward him.
Joker catches my eye from across the common room like he can feel it. Maybe he can. The look he gives me is brief, but there’s a question in it. Not spoken. Not pressing. Just there.
You alright?
No.
Yes.
I don’t know.
I lift my chin slightly toward the hall.
His gaze sharpens for half a second, then he nods once.
That’s all.
No drama. No asking in front of everybody. No making it bigger than I’m prepared to survive.
He waits until Emma looks up and catches what passes between us. She glances at me once, then at Lexi, then gives the smallest possible nod like she understands exactly what’s happening and is going to make sure my daughter stays occupied without me having to ask.
The ease of that nearly throws me. Everything here still does sometimes. The quiet competence. The way these people move around each other like trust is just part of the structure.
I press my lips together and head for the side hall before I can second-guess myself.
Joker is already there when I turn the corner, leaning one shoulder against the wall outside our rooms, cut on, dark eyes on me in that steady, unreadable way that’s become more familiar than it should. “You alright?” he asks once I’m close enough that nobody else can hear.
I let out a breath that catches halfway out of my chest. “No.”
His expression doesn’t change much. That somehow makes this easier.
He pushes off the wall and opens the door to his room. Maybe that’s why I chose it. Maybe I need the lack of escape. Maybe I’m afraid if I picked somewhere too open, I’d run.
The door shuts quietly behind him. Not locked. Just closed.
He stays near it, giving me space, waiting. I hate him a little for how patient he can be when it matters. Because impatience would be easier to defend against.
Anger, too. Anything that gave me a reason to pull back and say never mind.
Instead, he just stands there in the dim room, broad shoulders filling too much space, hands quiet at his sides, and waits for me to decide whether I’m actually going to do this.
I look at the bed instead of him. Then the floor. Then finally his face.
“I need to tell you something,” I say. That’s a stupid opening. Obviously I need to tell him something or I wouldn’t have brought him in here like I’m about to confess to a murder.
He doesn’t point that out. Just says, “Alright.”
The word lands softly. Steady. Like he’s bracing the ground for me without making it obvious.
I swallow hard. “And I need you to let me say it all before you…” I trail off, because I don’t even know how to finish that sentence.
Before you lose your mind. Before you go looking for him. Before you do the exact thing some reckless, desperate part of me has already started hoping you might.
Joker’s gaze doesn’t leave mine. “Before I what?”
I force myself to answer. “Before you decide what to do with it.”
Something dangerous flickers behind his eyes. Not enough to be called an emotion. More like the suggestion of one. The shape of violence before it has a target.
But he nods once. “Talk.”
So I do. Or at least, I try.
For a second all the words jam in my throat because saying them in my own head and saying them out loud are apparently two entirely different acts of survival.
Then I think of Lexi in the other room. Of Bunny tucked under her arm. Of how close Cal has already gotten without ever stepping foot here.
“Cal isn’t my ex-husband,” I say, and even now the words taste like something rotten.
Joker’s eyes narrow slightly, but he doesn’t interrupt.
I force myself to keep going. “He’s still my husband. I ran before I could make any of it legal.”
My throat tightens hard enough to hurt. “There was no divorce. No court date. No clean break.” I shake my head once. “I didn’t leave with papers signed. I left trying to stay alive.”
Joker doesn’t move. Doesn’t react. Just stays very still, listening in the way he does when something matters.
“He’s a detective,” I continue, and that word comes out bitter enough that I hear it myself. “Homicide. Or he was last I knew. Maybe still is. It doesn’t really matter. The badge matters. The name matters more.”
Still nothing from him. No interruption. No visible surprise.
I press on before I lose momentum. “His family has connections everywhere. Police, politics, judges, people who owe them favors, people who want things from them, people who look the other way because it’s easier than saying no.” I let out a short, ugly laugh. “You know the kind.”
“Yeah,” he says quietly.
The one word is enough to keep me going.
“He was never just…” I stop, searching for the right shape of it and hating all of them. “He wasn’t just jealous. Or controlling in the way people joke about. It was everything. All the time.”
I force myself to meet Joker’s eyes for one second, then look away again because his full attention on me feels too heavy to survive for long stretches.
“He monitored my phone,” I say. “Read messages. Checked calls. Went through my emails. If I deleted something, he noticed. If I called my dad too many times in a week, he noticed. If I took too long at the store, he noticed that too.”
The room feels smaller now. Tighter.
My skin is too hot. Still, I keep going.
“He isolated me without ever saying that’s what he was doing.
It was always concern. Always him wanting to protect me.
He didn’t like my friends. Said they weren’t good for our marriage.
Didn’t like when my father got involved in our business.
Said we were supposed to handle things as a couple. ”
I can hear the old phrasing as I say it. The careful way Cal used to wrap control in love and hand it to me like a gift.
It still makes me sick.
“Then he started taking pieces,” I say. “One at a time. Until I looked up and there wasn’t anybody left but him.”
Joker’s face gives me nothing. That should be impossible, considering what I’m saying. But he doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t pity me. Doesn’t soften into something unrecognizable just because I’m finally giving him the ugly version.
He just absorbs it. Quietly. Terrifyingly.
That might be the only reason I can keep talking.
“He liked cameras,” I say next, and my voice almost fails me there.
“Inside the house. Outside. Hallways. Living room. Entryway. He called it security. Said it was because of his job. Said people might come after us because of something he was working.” I shake my head once.
“That was bullshit. He wanted to know where I was all the time. What I was doing. Who I talked to when he wasn’t there. ”
Joker’s jaw tightens. That’s the first visible thing he gives me. Barely anything.
Still enough.
I press on. “If I fought him on it, he’d make me pay for it later.” My fingers twist together briefly. I force them still. “Sometimes that meant yelling. Sometimes it meant days of him acting like I didn’t exist. Sometimes…”
The word catches.
I close my eyes for one second and finish it anyway. “Sometimes it meant he dealt me out a punishment.”
Silence.
Not empty silence. Not shocked silence. Something darker than that.
I feel Joker go still in a new way. Like even the air around him has changed.
I don’t look at him yet. I don’t think I can.
“He never saw a difference between wanting and taking if the thing he wanted belonged to him.” The words come flatter now, the numbness setting in where the fear used to live.
“That’s how he thought. He married me, so in his head that meant I was his.
My body, my time, who I talked to, where I went, all of it. ”
My throat burns.