Stealing Home
The Callahan Family, Book Two
Carrie Aarons
Copyright © 2021 by Carrie Aarons
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Editing done by Proofing Style.
Cover designed by Okay Creations.
For FSK.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
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About the Author
Prologue
Walker
Six Years Ago
I guess that’s it then, I think as I down the rest of my tequila on the rocks.
Typically, I’m a beer man. Or maybe a whiskey if it’s a stuffy event I’m forced to go to by my coaches or the executives at the ballpark. But tonight? No, tonight requires tequila. Mind-numbing, bad thought-erasing, will-knock-me-out-of-my-misery tequila.
She flits around the room, saying hi to guests and getting swept up in the bliss of her night. Well, technically it’s their night, but all the events surrounding a wedding are usually about the bride. The groom just puts on a tux and shows up, nodding his head yes at the right moments and then smiling for pictures.
Hannah is getting married, but she’s not marrying me.
No, she’s marrying Shane Giraldi, the asshole I play on the same major league baseball team as. Lord knows what she sees in him, though I guess if I was being objective and didn’t hear his disgusting, degrading locker room talk, the guy has a certain charm about him. Shane is always the loudest in the room, the entertainer, the cool kid that everyone congregates around as he tells wild stories with even wilder hand gestures.
Personally, I never understood their relationship. She is effortlessly kind and soft-spoken, while he preens more than a peacock.
She catches my eye again as she shimmies across the dance floor, a shy but vibrant smile reaching all the way to her eyes. From the table I’m sitting at, sulking, in the back of her rehearsal dinner, my heart kicks up about three notches. Jesus, she looks so beautiful it hurts.
With all of that curly black hair, smooth olive skin, and bright blue eyes, I’ve always imagined Hannah fitting right in on the white-sand shores of a Caribbean island rather than in Packton, Pennsylvania. The first time I ever met her, about a year ago when Shane got traded to the team, it was so hard to keep my eyes off of her that she probably thought I was insane. Hannah has the personality of the girl next door trapped in a bombshell body. A lithe body with luscious hips, full natural breasts, and an ass I can rarely keep my eyes off of. Will I ever find another woman I find half as attractive?
Having met her family, some of them this very night, I see where she gets her exotic looks. Tonight, she seems to glow so brightly that I’m tempted to go half-cocked and say something I can never take back. Now or never. Forever hold your peace. Isn’t that what is always said at the altar, when someone stands up and professes their undying love?
I’m sure it’s the tequila talking. I don’t necessarily have an undying, unrequited love for Hannah. But having spent a bunch of time with her over the last year or so, the two of us talking at the bar while Shane was holding court, we’ve grown close. And then there was that one dinner we had together when her fiancé was shooting an endorsement campaign in the middle of a three-game road trip. I almost spilled the beans on how big of a crush I had on her, and I knew Hannah knew that. The way her eyes had seemed shifty, the blush in her cheeks—something there hadn’t seemed so unrequited.
Now, though, we’d never know. She was clearly head over heels in love with my teammate, and I carried a silly torch for a girl I’d never even been on a proper date with.
I’d get over it. Tomorrow, I’d watch her walk down the aisle to another man. And they’d ride off into the sunset while I searched for my happily ever after.
But tonight? Tonight, I get to drown my sorrows in tequila. Tonight, I am allowed to mourn a love that will never be, and burn the rest of my fantasies in the singe of this alcohol.
Hannah
Present Day
Something scratches the window, and suddenly, I’m as spooked as my five-year-old daughter when I forget to put her three night lights on.
My blood runs cold, my heart comes to a screeching halt, and sweaty goose bumps break out all over my skin. I lie in a bed that isn’t my own, completely paralyzed, wondering if I hear it again, if that will spur me to pull open the nightstand drawer next to me and grip the handle of the Swiss army knife I’ve placed there.
Turning my head mere centimeters at a time, I look to the shadows painting the window; the moonlight casting an eerie backdrop over this unfamiliar room. Throat dry as the Sahara, every limb shaking, I have convinced myself he’ll be standing outside my second-story window in the minute it takes me to turn my eyes to it.
But when I get there, it’s only a tree branch. The most cliché of sounds that go bump in the night, except it’s no wonder why I’m so spooked.
When nowhere, not even your own bedroom or the isolation of your brain, has been a safe space in the last five years, this is what you become. A spineless, petrified shell of a person, not even hanging on to a thread of hope that the scary thing is just a tree branch against the window.
Because I’ve witnessed the monster firsthand, I’ve felt the guttural pain of its wrath and suffered at the hands of all-consuming fear and rage. Last week, while pushing a cart full of two little girls and groceries through the supermarket in our new town, someone dropped a can of corn farther down the aisle. I actually ducked, hid behind the cart, cowering with tears in my eyes. I couldn’t even stand until I’d counted to ten and took deep breaths, determined not to break down in front of my children and a bunch of well-meaning strangers.
It’s been two weeks since my husband’s arrest, since he went to prison and got out on bail the same exact night, and I’ve barely slept a wink. As my girls snooze just down the hall, sharing a room for the first time in their life in a house eight times smaller than the mansion they were brought home to from the hospital, I lie awake in puddles of my own sweat.
I’m con
vinced Shane, my husband, is going to track us down. That he’ll ignore the restraining order I filed against him and show up on my doorstep. That me, a weak, pitiful version of the woman I once was, will take him back again, even now that the whole world saw what he did to me.
How many times has he come begging back, talking about forgiveness and love and commitment? How many times have I accepted a gentle kiss on the same jaw he nearly dislocated? How many bracelets has he affixed over bruised wrists? How many times has he pulled the “father of my children” card, the girl’s tiny, sad faces filling my mind?
This kind of thinking isn’t uncommon. At least that’s what the therapist who I now visit twice weekly tells me. Victims—it’s still so hard to swallow that word in relation to me—of domestic violence often blame themselves for the breakup of the family. They blame themselves for the abuse because if they were just more perfect, if they could anticipate their partner’s mood better, if they could provide a better life, then he wouldn’t beat me. If I wasn’t so unloveable, then my family would still be together.
Over the last five years, I’ve convinced myself of this. Shane warped my thought-process so much that I found myself, on nights like tonight, wondering how the hell I could put my family through this pain? If I could just be more, do more, then my husband would love me and not hurt me, and our children wouldn’t eventually come from a broken home.
I cling to the three thoughts my therapist, Margaret, and I have come up with to get me out of this negative thought space. Squeezing my eyes shut against the dark and the tree branch scratching the window, I visualize and tick them off on my fingers:
1. A world where my girls have a mother who isn’t terrified all the time;
2. The freedom to do and say as I please, without scrutiny or consequence;
3. And the future that looks any way I want it to, free of Shane’s wrath.
Of course, the doubts creep in as much as I try to push them away. How will I achieve that future? My husband is a star athlete, a famous person who has the love of a million fans on his side. He’s a World Series champion and a beloved member of our town, Packton, Pennsylvania. In our six-year marriage, through the birth of our two daughters, I’ve only seen his clout—and his ego—grow to enormous heights.
The truth is, I never would have left. I put up with the hitting, punching, screaming, controlling, and intense jealousy for so many years; it almost felt second nature now. If Colleen Callahan hadn’t seen that bruise on my wrist, if Walker hadn’t questioned me in the hallway at the stadium that one day, if my sister hadn’t come to visit and seen how tense things were … these were the events that set the ultimate climax of the situation in motion. Shane grew angrier and angrier by the month, and I felt like all the walls were closing in.
If he hadn’t attacked me in the parking lot of the Pistons’ ballpark that night, there would be no evidence. I’d never reported his abuse, too scared by my own poisonous thoughts and his threatening and conditioning, and now that’s working against me in the court system. Since they view Shane as a first-time offender, it’s only making things more difficult for me, and my girls.
But Noelle, my five-year-old, and Breanna, my two-year-old, are the reasons I’m not dropping the charges. They are the ones who gave me strength when my lawyer called and told me more bad news. Just seeing their faces, knowing that someday they were going to read the articles and watch the videos about what their father did to their mother …
I want to be better for them. I want to get out for them.
Now that millions of people have seen the pictures of my battered cheeks, my bleeding forehead, and the marks and scrapes Shane left, I can’t escape it. Two nights ago, I finally slipped and let myself google the articles. They ranged from bad to worse, all speculating about our marriage and my husband’s temper, or what we’d fought over. I almost threw my laptop against the wall when I read one that claimed I was an unfit mother for staying in a relationship where my daughters were clearly in danger.
But when I looked at those pictures, the ones the police snapped in the interview room and some media outlet had hacked or leaked, I didn’t even recognize that woman. Sure, I’ve looked in the mirror too many times to count after his fists would ignite fury on my skin. I’ve seen the bruises and blood, the fractures that I never had a doctor look at, even a broken finger I splinted myself.
What struck me the most when looking at those pictures, though, was how dead my eyes were. My mother tells my sister and I every time she sees us that we have the most brilliant blue eyes, brighter than the ocean our grandfather grew up on in Hawaii. The eyes looking back at me in those police photos were void of life, sucked of energy, ready to quit.
I couldn’t do that to the little girls I promised to protect with every part of me. And I could no longer disrespect the family who had sacrificed so much to make it on the mainland, putting their brilliant genes to shame.
As much as it terrifies me, as much as I quake in my boots every time I think of trials and divorce and custody battles I have to press on. If I don’t I know I will end up dead.
The chilling realization steals every inch of safety from my soul, which I know is just how Shane plans to fight me through this thing.
My mind flashes back to the last time I felt truly safe. Before that night in the parking lot, I would have said five years ago or so, in the month leading up to Noelle’s birth. Something about the arrival of our daughter brought out the devil in Shane, although it was escalating verbally even before then.
But five years is the benchmark. The first time he slapped me across the face was after Noelle screamed her colicky way through an entire night before a playoff game. I would have told you that was the last time I felt truly safe.
Except now, I’d be lying. Because the last time I felt safe was the very night that my entire life changed before my eyes.
The last time I felt safe was when Walker Callahan cradled me against his chest and pressed kisses to each bloody cut on my forehead.
And it’s only when I give into that sensation, imagining his arms around me, that I can finally fall asleep.
2
Walker
It may be World Series media week, the five days leading up to baseball’s biggest championship where thousands of reporters stick microphones in your face and ask you everything from the professional to the inappropriate, but it sure as hell doesn’t feel like it.
I’ve been here twice before, once bringing home a ring and another time losing in hellacious fashion. These press junkets and schmoozing events leading up to the seven most important games played in a major league season are supposed to be fun. Competitive. Mostly light-hearted.
Just the same as each time I’ve been here, the Packton Pistons field has been transformed into a midway at a carnival, of sorts. There are sponsor tents everywhere, sports equipment companies, and energy drink manufacturers, and different media outlets all hocking their products. Fans mill about in a specific section, and I can already hear the rowdy ones getting drunker as the afternoon trudges on.
And above it all, the stadium I grew up in and have come to love like another family member, looms large. I can make out the retired numbers of all-star Pistons players from where they’re enshrined on the outfield wall, and my heart thumps a beat. To everyone else, this feels like the same song and dance from World Series’ before.
This media week, though, feels nothing like my media weeks of the past.
The amount of times I’ve been asked about the Shane Giraldi charges is astronomical. And each time a reporter brings it up, questions how I was involved, if I’ve talked to that piece of shit, or what I think the future holds with the trial I want to flip the fucking table over. I want to go scorched earth, scream at them, and tell them the real version of what happened. Not the seventy-five angles the media is covering or how they illegally violated his wife’s privacy and blasted pictures of her at her most vulnerable all over the Internet.
I
still don’t know where Hannah, Shane’s wife, is and no one will tell me. Not even Colleen, my cousin and the general manager of the Packton Pistons, the major league team our family has owned for generations. She might be my best friend in this world, and the person most helping Hannah at this moment, but she’s being awfully tight-lipped for someone who says she cares about me.
When I cornered her again at today’s press junket, just before we had to go on stage, she said, “Walker, I know how much you’re worried about her. But it’s in everyone’s best interest if she got some space, if she has time to settle down with the girls without any more tension or emotions in the way.”
I’m pretty sure she knows now, even if we’re not explicitly saying it, how I feel about my teammate’s wife. How I’ve always felt. Throughout the years, I’ve done a damn good job of hiding it, of being cordial but aloof to her at social gatherings and acting like a fun uncle to her children. But that night, two weeks ago, when I saw her lying on the ground completely broken, nothing was keeping me from her anymore.
All logic went out the window, only instinct and the raw emotions I’ve shoved down for six years took over, as if I was on autopilot. And as I accompanied her to the hospital, sat by her bed as she slipped under from the drugs they gave her to rest, smoothed her hair away from her forehead and touched her hand simply because I could …
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