Chapter 28

Avery

I wake up all curled up on the couch Jack first laid me on when he rescued me from my car crash. My body doesn’t ache like it did that first time I woke up here. Actually, it feels pretty nice. Like my legs are made of jiggly, wobbly Jell-O and my pussy is made of whipped cream.

Before Jack, I never thought about my pussy this much in my life. Now, I can’t get my freaking mind off of it. Pussy, pussy, pussy—that’s all I ever seem to talk about anymore.

Maybe it’s because when Jack’s around, my previously dormant pussy is just plain loud. Jack will say something—something totally innocuous, even—and my clit will jump to attention like it’s been trained to the sound of his voice.

That man could tell me, “Come,” and I’d be too busy moaning to ask, “How many times?”

He’s saved me from certain death twice now. Stopped me from doing something that would end up with me getting myself killed several times more. He’s fed me off his own rations, washed the smoke and oil off my body, laid me to sleep in his bed…

He’s done things to me that only a husband is supposed to do. But the man who was supposed to be my husband is a fraud and a traitor, and Jack…Jack is good. He’s got some idiotic notion that he’s anything but—I can see it, feel it—but he’s wrong.

I feel like I was surrounded by a pack of hungry wolves before Jack scooped me up in his big, burly arms. Men who only wanted to shuffle me around for the sake of their own power and position. Hungry women who wanted to eat me alive.

Now that I’ve given myself to this huge, shaggy bear of a man, I’ve never felt safer in my whole life.

Suddenly, I know exactly what I want to do with the rest of my life when I leave this mountain: nothing. Because I never want to leave at all.

Maybe it’s naive. I keep telling myself that I’m not an idiotic little girl anymore, but I know how it must sound. The fantasy of it is so enthralling that I find myself lost in it, though.

Jack has been out here for a decade. He’s off the grid—off the everything—and knows this mountain like the shrapnel scars on his chest. He’s almost completely self-sufficient by my standards—only needs to go into town once every few months for a few necessities like toiletries and a little food.

There’s no reason that on one of those trips, we couldn’t pick up a marriage license and pop into a little church—or, hell, we don’t even need to get married. Maybe it would be better that way. I could just fade out of existence and into Jack’s arms. Give him a whole bunch of little mountain babies—more than he can count.

Adam would never find me here. Neither would my father. And I would never—never ever ever ever—have to sit through another boring freaking state dinner ever again.

It’s a nice fantasy.

One that I don’t quite want to let go of yet.

I never imagined being anyone’s wife in the way that I suddenly want to be Jack’s wife. In my world, wives start getting Botox at twenty-five and breast implants immediately after giving birth to the obligatory 2.5 children. In my world, wives are expected to look pretty, dress perfectly, entertain the French ambassador’s wife with vapid small talk while the husbands do business over wine and dessert, and look hurt but supportive as they stand by their man while he apologizes for his inevitable sex scandal.

In Jack’s world, that’s all out the door.

I look around the cabin, trying to imagine my role in this newly imagined life.

It’s a beautiful cabin. Maybe a little dirty, but gorgeously built.

Cleaning…that’s it! What this place needs is a good cleaning.

It takes me a little bit to gather supplies. Truth be told, I’ve never even cleaned my room before. We had maids for that. But eventually, I’ve got the soot cleaned off the mirror in the foyer and the corners cleared of cobwebs.

I’ll have to see if Jack has any little red bandannas I can tie my hair back with. Once spring comes, I like the idea of giving these floors a nice, hard scrub. I know it sounds stupid, but I actually feel good about doing the work. For the first time in my life, I’m actually feeling useful. It’s quite a satisfying change.

But once that’s done…well. You know what they say about idle hands…

I know I’m being bad. I’m not an idiot, even though I know I act like one from time to time. I move up to Jack’s bedroom under the guise of cleaning, but I know good and well what this really is.

Snooping. I’m snooping around Jack’s house like a hungry dog sniffing out treats.

The back of his closet is surprisingly barren, save for Buck, who’s curled up inside gnawing on one of Jack’s boots and bolts when he gets caught.

Jack is the ultimate minimalist. I don’t even find any dirty magazines or questionable VHS tapes beneath Jack’s mattress.

Everything he owns seems to have a purpose. No sentimentality. No useless junk. A place for everything, and everything has its place. Even his military medals are exactly where Jack wants them: tucked away beneath his wool socks, out of sight and out of mind.

But then, I try the bottom drawer of his dresser.

It sticks in place the first time I try to yank it out. But when I leverage all of my meager weight on it—and pay the price by tumbling backward as a result—finally, it gives.

The drawer doesn’t contain much. Jack’s old high school yearbooks—I do a quick flip through to look for him, but he went to one of those massive schools, and without even realizing it, I haven’t bothered to get his last name. I delve deeper and bring up a gorgeous wooden box, latched but not locked.

I know just holding it in my hands that Jack made this box.

What I couldn’t have possibly expected was what it contains within.

A photo album. Not pictures like the ones from his military days that need to be hidden way—no, this book has remained closed and unintentionally forgotten for a good long time. I blow the dust off it and nearly knock myself backward with the force of the sneeze that follows.

But then I open it, and the first picture inside nearly knocks me backward of its own accord.

There’s Jack—just a young man, fresh-faced and beardless in a brand-new uniform. He looks about as old in this picture as I am now. The man and woman standing behind him must be his mother and father. Their faces aren’t familiar to me, but they’re a handsome couple. They look like lovely people.

Lovely in-laws, maybe, the greedy voice in the back of my head sing-songs.

Shut up, I pout, like it’s teasing me for being so silly.

When my eyes land on the second half of the photograph, though, not even the greedy little voice in the back of my head has anything to say.

My parents. My parents are in this picture. There’s Mommy in her demure pencil skirt and blazer. Daddy in his power suit. And there at their legs, grinning up her best toothpaste ad grin, is…me. Just a little kid—little enough that I hardly remember this photo being taken.

There’s a caption beneath the photo, too. It’s the caption that really does me in.

Oh no.

Oh no.

Lawson and Wilkins families, the caption reads, followed by the date it was taken.

I might not recognize Jack or his parents from this day, but that name, Lawson…

Being the daughter of Congressman Wilkins, there’s no forgetting that name. It’s the name Daddy ends up bellowing while he pounds his fist against the dinner table during reelection season. A name that makes him go redder than a baboon’s butt when he hears it in passing. The name that I’ve even heard him mutter in his sleep once or twice.

Lawson. Jack Lawson.

Jack’s parents must be the Lawsons, then. Daddy’s former campaign donors turned greatest enemies. They used to be some of his very best friends—a rich family with a rich military tradition. Great for the polls. Great for support from his constituents.

Until they threw him under the bus, that is. Pulled all their campaign funding. Accused Daddy of making government deals with shady weapons dealers and war criminals. Getting our soldiers overseas killed with bad weapons and malfunctioning technology.

I always tried to take Daddy’s side, of course. After all—I used to be a very good girl, remember?

“I hate the Lawsons,” I remember saying. “They’re…they’re liars! And crooks!”

“That’s right, Avery,” Daddy would say back, patting me absently on the head. “Good girl.”

But I’m not a good girl anymore. Maybe I never was to begin with.

This isn’t the first time I snooped where I wasn’t supposed to, after all.

My mind flashes back to just a few days ago. The wedding that was supposed to be my own. The horrible events that prevented it from happening.

The text messages between Daddy and Adam, uncovering the truth. My marriage to Adam wasn’t the only shady deal passing between them—no, there were billions of government dollars passing through Daddy’s pipe into Adam’s company’s guns.

And then, there were the other messages. The even worse ones.

Lack of weapons testing. Rescinding of safety funding. And the emails, not written in English, but in something that Google Translate thought might be Pashto or Dari or Farsi…

When I close the photo album, I can tell my face is as white as Jack’s sheets before he fucked me on them.

I know what I have to do. Even if I have to do it through a waterfall of tears.

The truth. I have to tell Jack the truth.