I didn’t go home that night.

Iain convinced me to do otherwise, with warm food and a warm bed, his arms wrapped around me in such a way that I couldn’t bear to leave him. We ended up watching a movie, or most of one, before his hands wandered just so up my leg under the blanket we shared, his touch sending sparks straight through me.

I liked being with him. I liked the comfort he gave me, the fire in his eyes. When we were in bed together, I felt like someone else, someone in control. Someone far away from Indiana.

He never pressured me, never probed. I had my doubts about having a serious relationship with him, or with anyone, but for now, what we were doing felt like it could work. Nothing too serious - just fun, and comfort.

For now, it was everything I could ask for.

The next morning, I begrudgingly went home alone. I had to work in the evening, and I knew I’d have to answer to Shannon about why I didn’t come home last night like I said I would.

I also knew, without a doubt, that she would expect answers. Real ones. I couldn’t hide behind excuses any longer. I’d spent the last four months avoiding telling her anything of consequence about my marriage with Brandon. I owed her the truth.

Even though it was barely past eight, she was awake and in the kitchen, getting a roast ready for the slow cooker. She wasn’t dressed for work but was in lounge clothes, her dark, curly hair unruly in a lazy ponytail. She didn’t look up from the cutting board as I approached, but her mouth tightened and her brow pinched. I sighed, ready for a verbal reaming I knew I deserved.

“Hey,” I said. “Sorry I didn’t come home last night.”

She looked at me, setting down her knife. I wasn’t sure how to read her expression.

“You don’t have to apologize. I’m not your keeper.”

Ouch. Nervous energy hit me, anxiety pouring over my skin, hot and cold prickles as we stared each other down. My thumb went absently toward my ring finger, hitting only bare flesh. I swallowed.

“I know you’re not. I told you I’d be home, though, and I wasn’t.”

“You were out with him again, then? Iain?”

“Yes, I was.”

Her brow furrowed, and she nodded. “I see.”

“Do you not approve?”

Shannon didn’t answer right away. She turned around and went to the sink, washing her hands quickly. She grabbed the dish towel next to the sink and dried her hands in it then flung it back down.

“It’s not that I don’t approve.” She looked at me again, bit her lip. Then she continued. “But I’m worried about you. You were sobbing in this same spot not even two weeks ago. You said you weren’t ready to file for divorce from your husband, but then you meet some random guy and go home with him two nights in a row? I’m not judging you, I’m just… concerned.”

I took a deep breath. Now was the time to tell her. She had been there for me through thick and thin. She never asked questions. She always was there for me to talk to. She opened her home up to me, she helped me find a job. She begrudgingly accepted the rent I paid her, insisting she didn’t need it. She was a real friend to me, and I had repaid her with clamming up and refusing to talk about the real reason I was even here.

“I ran off on Brandon because I came home from the grocery store one day and found him in bed with someone else.”

“What?”

“Yeah. The day I left him. I came home, I heard him fucking another woman.” I licked my lips, standing stock still, refusing to let the memory hit me like it did at Iain’s. I was more than the memories Brandon left me. “It wasn’t a sad thing. I wasn’t shocked, or even upset, like a normal wife should be. To me….” Tears pricked my eyes, and I blinked them away furiously. “It was the opening I’d been waiting for.”

“To leave him,” she said.

“Yes. I haven’t talked about my marriage with Brandon because… it’s hard. I’m not over it. It wasn’t just a bad marriage, Shannon. It was hell.”

“What are you saying? He… he hit you?” She raised a hand to her mouth as she said this, her face contorting into an expression of pity. I didn’t want pity - I just wanted her to see.

“Yes. That is what I am saying.”

“More than once?” she asked.

I nodded, looking down at my feet. “A lot more than once.”

“Oh my god. I’m so sorry. I mean, I had an idea, and I knew there was something about you that just… I don’t know. I just thought something like this had happened. But to hear you say it after all this time….” She took a shuddering breath. “I just… that’s just….”

“Don’t feel sorry for me. That’s not why I’m telling you. I’m out of there. I’m safe, or at least I thought I was.”

Her eyes flicked toward the corner of the kitchen, as if turning on X-ray vision to see the front door, which was securely locked and bolted shut. Then she looked back at me.

“You thought you were safe, but something changed? Did you see him? Is he in Brooklyn?”

I shook my head. “No, but he hired an investigator to find me.” I shuffled in place, nervously. “Iain.”

“What?!”

Holding my hands up, I said, “He’s the one I ran into on the street, the one who told me which train to take. He showed up at the bar a few nights later. I thought it was an interesting coincidence but wasn’t sure how to connect the two together. He said he was a customer of the bar. Then he left his number. I didn’t call it at first, but… damn, I was… you know. Attracted to him. I was confused. So I called him. I gave him my fake name and everything. But I didn’t know that he already knew who I was.”

“You’re knowingly sleeping with the guy your crazy-ass husband hired to find you?”

“It’s not like that,” I told her, pleading. “He confessed everything to me. He told me that Brandon fed him this cock-and-bull story about how I was a cheater, how I stole his money and ran off on him. But Iain… he saw through it, somehow.”

Shannon was shaking her head, her eyes alight with something wild and fearful. “He just told you everything? Unprompted?”

The day he’d taken me sight-seeing flashed through my mind, the cold wind hitting my face as I ran out on him at the Olive Garden in Times Square. “I mean, yeah. I got cold feet when we were in the middle of a date, and I… sort of snuck out and left. He caught up to me and… he called me by my real name. Then he told me everything.”

She shook her head again, looking at the counter where her half-cut carrot sat.

“He and Brandon knew each other in the Army. He said that Brandon saved his life.”

“Ugh.” She waved that thought away, clutching her stomach as if it made her physically ill.

“He said he called Brandon and dropped the case. Iain told him he couldn’t find me and he thought that maybe I’d gone to Tampa.”

“Tampa?”

“Yeah. That’s where my mom lives.”

“Did Brandon tell him that or something?”

I shrugged. “I guess so. I’m sure Brandon told him a lot of shit. Some true, some not.”

There was a stark silence after this. Shannon returned to her cutting board, finishing up the carrot and throwing the pieces into the slow cooker.

I thought telling her everything would have calmed her down, would have made her understand. But it seemed to have done the opposite: her cheeks were red, her brow knit, her eyes boring into the potato she had pulled out as if she could burn a hole through it, her knife working quickly as she chopped it up into cubes. I could see her mind working; I could see the wheels turning in there.

“You trust him? Iain?” she asked finally, her voice resigned.

I considered her question. I had trusted him with a lot of myself; my story, my body, my home. I had opened up to him in ways I hadn’t with another person in years. When he looked at me, it was like he was looking at the only thing in his world. That scared me, but it thrilled me, too.

“I… do.”

She nodded. “I trust your judgment.”

“You do?” Relief spread through me, overlapping with the anxiety. The mix was strange and left me feeling giddy.

“Of course I do. I’m still worried, because if Iain dropped the case, that means Brandon’ll just hire someone else, but….” she looked over at me briefly, before looking back at her potato. “You seem happy. Lighter, somehow.”

I grinned. “I guess I am.”

“You like him, then?” She threw the potato pieces into the slow cooker and grabbed a measuring cup, pulling chicken stock from the fridge and pouring some in.

“Well….” I thought of his sky-blue eyes, of his smile. His lips that begged me to kiss them. His hands under my shirt. I thought of the other things, too: of his laugh, the way he teased me. It’s no coincidence that you and I met, he’d said. I was starting to believe that was true. “Yes. I like him, a lot.”

“I’d say so. You’re practically glowing.”

I giggled at that, and she gave me a smile before putting the lid on the pot and turning it on.

“What are you going to do if Brandon shows up?” she asked me, washing her hands again. “I just think that now that you’ve found someone you’re interested in, maybe it would be a good idea to make a decision about what you want to do.”

Brandon’s face sprung to mind, his brown eyes boring into mine, his perfect teeth exposed through a vicious smile. My heart picked up in my chest, my breathing stopping entirely as I tried to see myself finally in front of him again, seeking divorce. The idea of seeing him in the flesh after four months of freedom scared me, but the fear wasn’t as fresh as it felt just two weeks ago. The fear was still potent, though, and I knew that I still wasn’t ready to move forward.

“I can’t.”

“Can’t what?”

“I am not ready to get a lawyer for a divorce. I’m not ready for him to know where I am.”

Shannon’s face took on that expression of pity again. “But Michele, he already knows where you are. That’s why he hired Iain in the first place.”

Shaking my head, I said, “Iain sent him off to Tampa. That’ll keep him distracted for a while.”

“Okay, even if the dude fell for that… which I’m sure he didn’t… Tampa will only distract him long enough for him to figure out you’re not there. Then it’s back to square one, which is Brooklyn, where he knows you are.”

“New York is big,” I said. I was fishing for anything, scrambling to keep my grip on the cliff’s edge. “It’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack.”

“I would agree with that, if he was doing it himself. But he hired a professional. He’ll hire another. He’s loaded, right? Related to a bunch of politicians and shit? He can hire the best.”

She was trying to plant doubt right in the middle of everything I’d cultivated the last few months. My entire worldview had revolved around the fact that I was hidden from him. I knew that if he found me, he’d take me back to Indiana. To lock me back up in that house, to punish me for leaving him in the first place. I knew it deep, deep as marrow, like it had been etched inside of my bones.

And if he found out about Iain?

Coldness spread through my chest at that, and I shook it away, quickly. I couldn’t even contemplate it.

“I’ll figure it out,” I told her. “Soon.”