“It’s been almost two weeks, damn it. How the hell can one woman evade you for two weeks? She’s got to be here somewhere!” Alec yelled into the phone after Mark finished his report. They’d found nothing. Not a damn thing.

The same not-a-damn-thing Alec had found when he’d searched Patrick and Laura’s house. If Patrick had collected evidence of Alec’s creative accounting measures and the bribes he’d paid to win the contracts they’d been awarded over the years, it wasn’t anywhere in the house. That only left Laura. She had to have it. And, that meant he needed to have her.

“Go see that doctor again. Press him. There must be something there. And pay whatever the hell you have to for the damn security tapes from the hospital. Someone will sell them to you. There’s a price for everything. Find their price!”

Alec slammed down the phone. Where the hell was Laura Kensington hiding? He threw his coffee mug across the office where it hit the wall, leaving a gouge in the plaster he’d have to find some way to cover. Great. One more thing to take care of.

* * *

Laura leaned the basket of vegetables on her hip and carried them into the house. Helping May in her garden was turning out to be as relaxing as working in her greenhouse. More so, in fact, since she and May could now cook what they had grown together. She’d never seen a Japanese eggplant, but May assured her she would love the way it thickened the pasta sauce they would make with it.

“Those look beautiful, Laura,” May said as she picked up the tomatoes and green beans and placed them by the sink to wash. “We’ll have to can some of these tomatoes. Have you ever canned fruits and vegetables?”

Laura shook her head as she got out the cutting board and a knife.

“It’s actually silly that we call it canning, since we’ll use jars, but I’ll teach you how to do it.” May leveled Laura with a look. “Before you move on, I mean.”

This time Laura nodded, not quite knowing what to say. She knew May didn’t want her to leave, and part of her was beginning to wonder if perhaps she could stay. No, wonder, wasn’t the right word.

Hope.

But she’d learned hope hurts.

Hope. Hurt. Hope. Hurt. It was like a singsong cadence in Laura’s head that wouldn’t stop. Hope leads to hurt and Laura didn’t want to hurt anymore. She’d hurt enough.

“You know, Laura. It occurred to me that before you leave it might be a good idea for you to talk to me about what happened to you.” May said it casually, as if she were asking about the weather outside.

Laura’s hands stilled but she didn’t reply. She stood frozen. The idea of talking about what Patrick had done to her was absolutely mortifying. How could she tell anyone? How could she ever share those details?

“You’ll be moving on soon, I suppose, so it would be like having a get-out-of-jail-free card. You get to tell someone about your time with your husband, but you don’t have to worry about the repercussions. You don’t have to worry about what I might think or how I’ll view you because of what you tell me. You can just get it off your chest before you go.”

May went on washing vegetables and handing them to Laura to cut up as if she hadn’t just opened an enormous can of worms. She continued to talk, explaining the way she had prepped the raised beds for the lettuce she grew, and told Laura she’d show her where the composter was to put the scraps in. So much like her son, just talking about everyday stuff until Laura somehow let down her walls.

Before Laura knew what had happened, she had tears running down her face and she’d stopped cutting. She moved blindly to the kitchen table and sank into a chair. May just waited, chopping and stirring and adding things to a pot on the stove. She handed Laura a dish towel for her tears, before she turned back to the stove once more as if nothing were happening behind her.

“I didn’t love him. Not even before I knew what he was, I mean. He was older than me, but he was attractive and paid so much attention to me. It was flattering to have someone like him pay so much attention to me. He seemed sweet and caring and he was going to take me away from my dad, which, well—that was a good thing.” Laura dabbed at her cheeks with the towel, but the tears were replaced with fresh ones so quickly, it had no real effect.

“My brother saw what Patrick really was. He knew somehow and tried to tell me. He tried to convince me to move in with him and we’d share a house together, but neither one of us had a job that paid much. I was waitressing and he was working at a hardware store stocking shelves. Neither of us had gone to college. I thought if I didn’t weigh him down with trying to take care of me he might put himself through community college someday. I thought Patrick might send me.... But I shouldn’t have married a man I didn’t love. I shouldn’t have done that just to get out of the situation I was in.”

She blew out a deep breath, and it felt as though some of the humiliation and pain of her marriage left her with it. “My dad threatened to disown me if I married Patrick, although I’ve never really been sure why. He used to tell me how worthless I was, how useless a girl was to him. But, I think he didn’t want me to marry Patrick because it meant he’d need someone else to cook and clean for him—or he’d have to learn to do it himself. Of course, his threat only made the thought of marrying Patrick all the more appealing.”

May came and sat with Laura at the table and held her hand while she talked. “I was so stupid,” Laura all but whispered, then just stayed like that for a long time, letting the tears clean away a little bit of the pain.

“When did it start?” May prompted, not addressing whether Laura had been stupid or foolish or just naive. Laura looked at her through the tears. She never thought she’d tell the details of her life with Patrick to anyone. It was too humiliating. She didn’t want people to see her as the kind of woman who would let someone do that to her, even though that’s exactly what she was. Exactly what she’d become.

“On our honeymoon. He couldn’t, um...when we tried to...” Laura waved her hands. “You know. When we tried, well, he couldn’t. He flew into a rage. I’d never seen anything like it. He told me it was my fault, that it was me. I was a virgin. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.”

“It wasn’t your fault. You know that, don’t you?” May asked.

Laura nodded, but didn’t look at the older woman. “He hit me.” Laura’s hand went to her neck at the memory of that night. “Choked me.”

Laura wasn’t crying any longer. She stared at a scratch on the big oak table, remembering the way hitting her had gotten Patrick excited, the way he’d raped her as dark spots swam at the corner of her eyes. “Raped me,” she whispered to herself.

She looked up at May. “The funny thing is, not all abusive husbands apologize the next day. You always read that, don’t you? How they send flowers and apologize and tell their wives it won’t ever happen again? It’s not true. Patrick didn’t care. He wasn’t sorry. He never sent flowers or tried to make it up to me. It was just who he was.”

As she spoke, the stories began to flow, coming more and more easily.

“In the beginning, he was very careful not to hit me in the face. He didn’t leave marks I couldn’t cover with long sleeves or a turtleneck. As time went on, his anger seemed to spiral and he wasn’t able to keep things as controlled any longer. There were times when I couldn’t leave the house for days.”

May listened while Laura told her more than she ever thought she’d share with anyone. Her brother’s death, and the resulting beating when she wanted to cancel a business dinner to go to the funeral. The way Patrick would drag her down the steps by her hair or throw her against the wall so hard the house shook. What it felt like to have a hot pan held against her skin when she didn’t cook the right thing for dinner.

She told about the sick games he’d play where she’d have to go get whatever it was he wanted to hit her with. She’d have to get him his belt or the length of hose he was fond of using. And the sick thing was, she’d know whether he would rape her after or not by how the beating went. When she had to get something he’d use to hit her with, it always ended with sex. As if the beating was foreplay for him.

Sitting at May’s kitchen table, Laura let out years of grief and anger and guilt and self-doubt. Everything came pouring out of her. Her plan to run. Her hope to keep her baby safe. It all came pouring out until there were no more words. There was nothing more to do than let May hold her and rock her, and as she sat there in May’s arms she began to let go of three years of absolute terror.