Chapter 2
TWO
I pulled into the garage and then stared at my dashboard for a moment, Corrine’s words seared through me.
Her stalker gave her a red ribbon. He said it meant a promise.
My own ribbon seemed to burn my flesh. It was just a ribbon.
To anyone else it would mean nothing. To me, it meant everything.
In some ways I cherished it more than my wedding ring.
I’d only taken it off a few times since Lock gave it to me two years ago.
Every time, I asked him to be the one to put it back on.
I took off my watch and stared at it. It was a coincidence.
That’s all. Nothing about the man Corrine described sounded like Lock.
He wasn’t cruel. He’d never even raised his voice to me.
I knew about abusive men. I’d built a career on holding them accountable.
In every case, there was a pattern. In every case, every time, their true colors would eventually bleed through.
But the NDA. I had my own in the safe upstairs.
I had signed it with no hesitation. Lock was a public figure, at least in Lasalle Harbor.
His family wealth was well known. If he’d been my client, I probably would have advised him to use them.
There was nothing wrong with the things we did when we were intimate.
We were married consenting adults. But he told me he’d been burned before by someone in his life.
I never questioned it. I never even asked him who it was.
To me the NDA was a reasonable request along with the prenup we signed.
I was never after Lock for his money. But I could understand there would be people who were.
I agreed with the others on the team. Nothing Corrine said rose to the level of a crime.
Her case went nowhere for a reason. If it came to it, I wasn’t sure how she would do on the witness stand.
The right defense attorney could make her seem unlikeable.
Eventually, my pulse beat more steadily.
The panic I’d held since Corrine started talking subsided. My thoughts were much clearer.
It was well past seven when I walked through the side door.
Lock and I lived only in the south wing of the grand house.
Even that took up almost two thousand square feet.
Far too big for the two of us. But the day we got married, Lock felt it was his duty to go back to his family’s residence.
Today, it felt empty. Crying out to be filled by children I hoped we would have.
The kitchen was dark.
“Lock?” I called out. It wasn’t like him not to wait for me for dinner. Even if he knew I’d be late. But he hadn’t called. Hadn’t texted. That was strange too.
The French doors leading out to the west garden stood wide open, letting a cool breeze come through. As it lifted my hair off my shoulders, I shuddered. Lock wasn’t in the house. There was only one other place he could be.
Setting my briefcase and purse on the dining-room table, I slipped off my heels and walked outside.
An ever-widening circle of slate pavers led to the most secluded part of the garden.
Lock’s grandmother had built it. A sanctuary where she could smell her roses and look out at the water.
From here, you could hear the foghorn from the Inner Lighthouse, due south of us.
He was there. Sitting on the wrought-iron bench wearing only a pair of black drawstring pants.
He was barefoot. Sweat glistened on his shoulders.
His hair was wet. He must have come here from the weight room upstairs.
I knew his knuckles would be scraped raw from working the medicine bag without gloves.
On a scale of one to ten, it meant we were at about an eight tonight.
“Lock?” I said gingerly. He sat with his knees drawn up to his chin, staring at the water, as still as the mermaid statue beside him.
He was having one of his bad days. The kind where he felt like he was drowning under the weight of everyone he felt responsible for.
The hundreds employed by the Manning Foundation.
Me. His wretched mother, tucked safely away in Monaco, putting an ocean between us.
Even Ben, the brother who was already dead.
“Lock.” I came to him. Sitting on the bench beside him, I put a light hand on his shoulder. “What happened?” Except I could already guess.
He squeezed his eyes shut. A muscle jumped in his jaw. When he opened his eyes, I saw how red they were. His pupils shrank to pinpoints. Anyone else might have thought he was drunk. I knew better.
“There were so many,” he whispered. “Forty, I think. Maybe more. I could see in their eyes that each one of them had a story I couldn’t bear.”
When his father died, Lock could have taken over the family foundation and left it the way it was.
He could have gone to dry board meetings and allocated money for Great Lakes conservation efforts and local artists.
Both were worthy causes. But that wasn’t Lock.
Instead, he created Bennett’s Place and built a sanctuary for kids who had rough childhoods like his, but not his resources.
Young boys who felt they had nowhere else to go.
Who had been abused, neglected, taught they were worthless.
At Bennett’s Place, they had a safe roof over their heads.
They had access to a good education, counselors, and ultimately a scholarship that could make college a reachable goal.
Lock insisted on reviewing each application himself, interviewing each young man, and hearing their stories face to face. It took its toll.
He nodded. “The planning’s going well for the fundraiser. We’re under two months away. But today, those scholarship applicants. There was this one boy. Terrence.”
Lock took out his phone. He pulled up a photo of a dark-haired boy, maybe fifteen or sixteen years old. He had haunted eyes. Eyes I’d seen in the man sitting beside me.
“His father killed his mother,” he said. “Right in front of him. Terrence tried to protect her. He ended up with a skull fracture. He has problems with his vision. His balance. But he’s bright, Mina. So smart. He wants to be a doctor. I want to help him.”
“Then you will.”
“I want to help them all.”
“You are. You’re giving them a safe place to be. Stability they’ve never had in their whole lives. A chance.”
He shook his head. “Sometimes it isn’t enough. Sometimes I can’t save them.”
Though the success stories of Bennett’s Place far outweighed the failures, it was the handful of failures that stayed with Lock the most. Those few young men were so broken they could never be mended. The ones who ended up knowing nothing but institutionalization once they left.
His body went rigid. Lock clenched his fists. I reached for him, slowly prying them apart. He looked at me, then crumbled. I pulled him toward me until his head rested in my lap.
Only one thing could soothe him when he got like this.
I would gently stroke his ear, tracing the curve over and over.
As I did it, I knew Lock was retreating to the darkest place in himself.
To the little boy who craved a loving touch from his mother.
Instead, Olivia Manning would turn away.
Close her ears to her son’s cries for help as his father hurt him.
As he called out to her, he would remember her taking her long red coat from the hall closet and going straight out the front door.
The red ribbon he gave me poked out from beneath my smartwatch as I stroked his ear.
The day he asked me to wear it, was the first day I learned about some of the horrors he faced.
He’d asked me never to wear the color red.
Not even red lipstick or nail polish. It was too painful a reminder of every time his mother walked out on him.
But the ribbon was a promise. A token. If I wore it, he said he knew I’d never leave him.
It was just a piece of fabric. A coincidence. Of course, it was.
As I held him and Lock tried to find himself again, how could I ever think that ribbon meant anything else?
“I’m okay,” he said, his breathing settling into a normal rhythm. I wanted to ask him what he saw behind those beautiful eyes of his today. I knew the answer would tear my guts apart.
He sat up. “Mina, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be so dreary. How can you even stand to be near me?”
“Stop,” I said.
“I didn’t even ask you how your day went. It was important to you.”
“Did you eat?” I asked.
He shook his head. “My assistant sent me home with some kind of pasta dish. You must be starving.”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“How did it go?”
I couldn’t shake Corinne Egan’s words out of my head. It was just a ribbon. A strange coincidence. That’s all it was. As Lock looked at me with those tortured eyes, I knew I’d been an idiot to get upset about the thing.
This was Lock. My Lock. How could I or anyone think for a second he was capable of hurting anyone? He’d never harmed a spider. While I was always ready to smash them with my shoe, he’d gently cup the ugly little things in his hands and carry them out to the garden.
“It went well, I think. It’s just… I guess it bothers me I’m the only woman on the task force. It feels like tokenism. I’m the only lawyer, too. And they’re all so much older than me.”
Lock smiled. “Are you trying to tell me any of that matters to you?”
“No. It was hard enough for me to win respect in that courthouse. A lot of people still see me as an outsider. I wasn’t born and raised here. And sometimes… it isn’t always an advantage when they know who I’m married to.”
Lock sat up and tucked an errant strand of hair behind my ear. “You earned your spot in that courtroom. And you did it before you even knew my name, Mina. Everyone knows what you’re capable of. Because I know it. It’s why I first fell in love with you.”
I rolled my eyes.
“I’m serious.” He smiled. “I sat there and watched you rip Vic Jaffe’s face off during that suppression hearing. He waltzed in there, his condescending, misogynistic self, and thought he was going to intimidate you. But you stood up and blasted him.”
“Right,” I said. “It wasn’t just because you were looking at my ass.”
He laughed. The sound rolled through me. He’d come back to me from the brink of that dark place where I found him.
“It’s a fine ass. And you were looking at mine too.”
He wasn’t wrong. A little over two years ago, Lock had accompanied another boy living in Bennett’s Place to court.
The boy had a hard time shaking his abusive past. He’d been arrested for shoplifting.
That day I’d been assigned his case. Lock asked to talk to me out in the hall.
He impressed me. I knew with Lock’s guidance the boy might stand a chance.
So, I offered him a plea deal that kept him out of jail and got him into counseling.
Just a few weeks ago, we got word he’d been accepted at Michigan State to pursue a business degree.
“I love you,” I said.
He furrowed his brow but kept his smile in place. “Are you okay?” he asked. He knew me too well. It shocked me sometimes how quickly we’d wrapped ourselves in each other’s lives. I barely remembered being any other way.
“It was just a long day,” I said, rising. “Come on. I’ll heat up that pasta.”
“I’m blathering on about this boy. And you spent your day talking about crime victims and figuring out how to save them. I’m sorry, Mina. My problems aren’t bigger than yours. Do you want to talk about it?”
It was like he could see right through me. But I could see through him too. He rose and took my hand.
This man had my heart. I had his. And I’d let myself get worked up over a piece of fabric and paper.
It was silly. Stupid. I dedicated my life to advocating for crime victims. I’d stared down rapists, the worst abusers.
I shredded murderers apart in the witness box.
I knew a dangerous man when I saw one. This man had the purest heart of anyone I’d ever met.
Lock wrapped his arm around me and led me back into the house.
As his fingers brushed mine, that red ribbon slipped down further on my wrist. He rubbed it with his thumb as we headed into the kitchen.
That silky ribbon had always made me feel safe.
Cherished. Chosen. Habit made me slide it back into place under my watch, hiding it from view.
The day he gave it to me, he told me it was our secret.
A tangible symbol of a bond no one else but the two of us would ever understand.
Until today, it was the truest thing I knew.
I could never accept that it was a lie. Could I?