The Midnight Estate #2
She shook her head again, then sighed and walked to the door. She pulled it open just a crack and now that she was closer Silas saw it. The faint outline of a fading bruise around her left eye, a healing split in her lower lip.
He’d experienced many emotions since he came back home, but the surge of pure fury that shot through him was almost as big
as the grief and the worry and the sadness. His vision went hazy and for the briefest second he had another moment of confusion,
just as he’d had when he saw Marie standing in the rain. She faded altogether and all he could see was his mother, with her
bruises and her trauma that everyone else ignored and that Silas could not fix.
“Did you talk to—”
“I did,” she murmured, then raised one wry finger to point to her face. “That’s why . . .”
“Irving did this?”
“Irving told Rupert I wanted to leave him.”
“Ah.”
“This isn’t your problem,” Marie said stiffly. “I am not your problem. I . . .” Perhaps she’d been about to lie, to tell him she had a plan, another option. Instead, her eyes
filled with tears and she leaned her forehead against the door. “How is your sister?”
“She passed away. That’s why I’ve been . . . I’m . . . It’s all wrapped up. I’ll drive to San Francisco tomorrow. I fly home
soon.”
A large part of the success of Silas’s career was his ability to link ideas and concepts in ways other people just could not, but an idea came to him in that moment, a solution so wild—so creative—that he would never really believe it had come from within his own mind.
Perhaps, from the other side of whatever lay beyond this life, Maeve had grown tired of watching him flounder to help this poor girl and shouted just loud enough for him to hear her.
He looked at Marie properly, assessing her features. Her eyes were brown, but not a dark brown, so in the right light, a person
might even call them hazel, as Maeve’s had been. And Marie’s hair was closer to blonde than it was to brown, but women changed
hair color all the time.
Maeve’s passport had never been used. He’d found it in her top drawer, beside her bed, dated five years earlier—about the
time they’d been writing to one another discussing her coming for a visit, about the time of her diabetes diagnosis. He’d
almost tossed it in the trash, but at the last second, he put it in the box of documents to take back to Australia. The dreamer
in him liked the idea of some part of her taking the trip, even if it was only her passport. He’d even taken her glasses—the
very same frames she was wearing in her passport photo, and the pearls too . . .
“How tall are you?”
Marie narrowed her eyes at him.
“I’m five-four,” she said. Confusion had distracted her from her tears and she was looking at him with something bordering
on suspicion and hurt. “Why would you ask me that?”
So, she was a little shorter than Maeve, and certainly much thinner, but with heels and perhaps some layered clothing . . .
The biggest issue was their ages. Marie was nineteen or twenty at best. Maeve had just turned thirty. But maybe with some
make-up . . . maybe different clothing . . .
“Do you want to leave him?”
Marie froze.
“I can’t,” she choked. “He’ll find me. He’ll kill me. I know he will. Besides, there’s no opportunity—I’m not even allowed to run my errands without him now. I can’t leave.”
“He’s not all-powerful. There are places you can go—”
“He told me he hid his first wife’s body so well that no one has ever found it,” Marie whispered tearfully. “I cannot leave.”
Silas sucked in a sharp breath. He had no way to know if what Marie said was even true—someone who would physically injure
his wife was certainly not above lying to keep her in line. But he did take just a moment to sanity check his idea. There
was a real possibility this man was a murderer. Did Silas really want to get involved?
It wasn’t even a question in the end. This young woman was in desperate need and he was apparently the only person in the
world willing and able to help her.
“Will you trust me, Marie? I have a plan, and I promise you I will do everything in my power to get you to safety and to keep
you safe, but you have to trust me. And we have to go right now.”
Her first instinct was to say no, to close the door, to rush back to the kitchen and start preparing Rupert’s lunch, because
he was due home in less than an hour. It was too risky. Too terrifying. Better the devil she knew than having the devil somewhere
behind her, invisible, chasing her down until he found her and then—
It was that thought that gave her pause because Marie had long concluded that even if she stayed, her days were numbered.
She would live out the next few years of her life according to Rupert’s needs and his schedule.
She would have a baby if she was indeed pregnant, and Rupert would control the baby too.
But given the way the noose around her neck had grown ever tighter over that year, Marie knew that it was inevitable that
his control would escalate. Already he decided what she ate and who she spoke to and what she wore and how she did her hair.
And now he’d physically hurt her too, and she couldn’t even pretend that would be the last time.
She had the definite sense that Rupert was some kind of monster who craved blood and violence, but he had learned to restrain
himself to achieve the things that he wanted to achieve. Like making lots of money. Like running the town with an iron fist.
She felt those fading marks on her face were some kind of foreshadowing of a future where staying inside to wait for bruises
to fade was a regular occurrence. When she closed her eyes, she could imagine her child, a little boy or girl dressed in a
sweater Marie herself had knitted, hair freshly combed and the cheeks rosy and shiny with tears, hiding under their bed to
escape the violence their father was meting out to their mother for some real or perceived offence. Marie could so easily
imagine that child pressing its hands hard over its ears, trying to block out the cries of pain from the bedroom next door. She could imagine that child growing up conditioned
to think that it was okay to take whatever they wanted from other people or learning to forget their own needs in the service
of keeping others happy.
And ultimately, she could imagine that child growing up without a mother when one day, Rupert lost his restraint entirely.
The only way to give this child a fighting chance was to leave.
“Yes,” she said, her voice firmer than it had been maybe in a whole year. “Please help me, Silas. Please.”