by Ev Bishop
He thought she could hurt him. She pulled back, breathing hard, dizzy with unfulfilled want, humiliation . . . and anger. She was furious with herself. He was right. Again. She was being terribly unfair. And weak. She had to stop this emotional pendulum of want, want not, want, want not. It was exhausting. And maddening. And beyond frustrating.
“If we can’t be more, I would like us to remain friends. But that means we need set in stone boundaries.”
She nodded. It made sense. Perfect sense. And it was wise. She even appreciated him for stating it. But it sucked. It totally and in every way sucked.
The trail they’d walked with the kids earlier—and the fork in the path—flashed into her mind. She had reached another fork and couldn’t stall forever. She needed to decide whether she truly lived by her motto in the framed picture or not. She couldn’t keep taking one step forward, three back. If she did, she would eventually hurt Brian to a point where they couldn’t even be friends.
She was bereft but no more enlightened when the cabin’s door opened, then shut, and Brian was gone.
Chapter 29
Katelyn was ten minutes late for work—and that was according to the spool-shaped clock hanging in Got The Notion, which always ran a bit slow. Tardiness was completely unusual for her. She considered not arriving ten minutes early as being late. It wasn’t her fault exactly, well, it was, but it was the lesser of two evils.
Steve had called and she had tried—unsuccessfully, she worried—to calm him down. No, that wasn’t quite right. He was calm. Icy, steely calm as he outlined every single way he perceived she had wronged him, was wronging him, had hurt him, was hurting him, and had damaged, was damaging the kids. There was nothing new in his tirade of complaints; the divorce papers had just amped him up. But a chilly, flat toned list of her failings was always a worse sign of danger than one of his hot-tempered flare-ups.
She noticed she was twisting her hands, and, with effort, stilled the anxious tell and smoothed her fifties’ style pencil skirt instead.
“Cute shoes. New?” Jayda asked, appearing from behind a hanging display of upholstery.
Katelyn looked down at her yellow Mary Janes. They were cute and they suited her retro outfit, but that was pure luck. She could’ve arrived barefoot or even shirtless for all the mental energy she’d given to thinking about her wardrobe that morning. “I’m sorry I’m late.”
Jayda shrugged, barely glancing up from a basket of bright-patterned Fat Quarters she was putting together for a door crasher sale. “It’s your first time ever. It’s fine. Are you okay though?”
“Um, yes. I think so. Why?”
“You’re as white as your blouse.”
Katelyn looked down again. Sleeveless. Boat-necked. Ecru. Good choice, but Heaven help her if she was really that bloodless. “It’s just stuff with Steve. Sorry. Nothing to take to work.”
Jayda, never idle, had finished her basket stuffing and was straightening a counter display of eclectic buttons and fasteners. She paused now, however, and gave Katelyn a steady look. “Just another thing I love about you. If every employee understood there should be a work-home life divide the way you do, I’d never have a moment’s stress.”
Jayda meant it as a compliment, but it was easy to hear the unspoken command too: don’t start sharing your troubles or ask for a stress day. Katelyn smiled, bobbed her head in a nod, and headed to the flannel section. Fall and winter prints had arrived over the weekend—seasons always ran about six months early in the shop to give crafters time to get inspired and to get projects done in time—and she needed to make room for them. She’d been looking forward to the task because handling new fabric always kindled ideas for her own sewing, but her heart wasn’t in it now.
She couldn’t shake the sense of foreboding Marilee’s warning had triggered, a feeling that had only intensified since Steve’s phone call. The lovely evening of respite from her fears, walking with Brian and the kids, checking out the beautiful abandoned property, might as well have never happened. It felt like the distant past, irrelevant now. The fact that she and Brian would most likely never enjoy a similar ease or visit again, and the pain that knowledge should have caused, was overshadowed by a low simmering dread. She was only numbly aware that the loss was going to hurt like the dickens when she was able to process things again.
“It’s just a feeling,” she muttered, pulling out a bolt of cotton candy pink flannel. “Stop being crazy.” But she wasn’t convinced. If anything, more than Marilee’s words of caution, more than Steve’s cold scariness during the call, the “mere feeling” was what had her on high alert. She’d learned long ago how much her safety and wellness, and Lacey and Sawyer’s, depended on her respecting her gut intuition.
But the morning passed without incident. She checked in with Aisha on her break, and the kids were doing great. It was unusually warm for May and they were having a blast running through the sprinkler and making homemade popsicles for later. Then a local quilter came into the shop with eight adult students she was doing a sixteen-week course for, all new to sewing, all in need of materials for their first projects. The rest of the morning evaporated.
At lunchtime, she called Aisha again and was reassured everyone was still fine.
“Is everything okay? You never call this much,” Aisha said before they hung up.
Katelyn hesitated. She didn’t want to be a drama queen, especially if there was nothing . . . but then again, what if Steve did show up?
“I should’ve told you this before. It’s probably nothing, but Steve and I had a bit of a row. He’s not happy about the divorce papers. If he shows up . . .”
If he showed up, what? Should Aisha panic and run the kids into the house? No, that probably wasn’t warranted and could be traumatizing. Should she call Jo or Callum? Or would that set Steve off?
She was saved from further deliberations by Aisha’s dry voice. “Exes, hey? Can’t live with them. Can’t kill them.”
Katelyn’s laugh was more like a croak. “Exactly.”
“Listen, it’s no problem and you don’t need to worry. We just finished lunch, Mo is wiped and ready for a nap, and I’ve already prepared Lacey and Sawyer for a quiet afternoon. They’re going to color while I read to them, and when Mo wakes up, we’ll do puzzles. We’ll stay inside, door locked, until you’re back.”
The surge of relief that rushed through Katelyn was almost painful, like blood rushing into a limb that has had its circulation cut off. She was almost nauseous with it. Which also scared her. What was she picking up? What?
She checked her messages after they said good-bye, then ate on the fly while running errands. She returned library books, picked up a few groceries, and hit a cash machine. The car was cranky leaving the bank. She finally got it going, but it limped down the road like it was having a hard time staying powered. Her gas tank was half full. Rats! She so didn’t need this. But then again, maybe it was car trouble her brain was intuiting. Maybe the bad feeling had nothing to do with Steve. Wouldn’t that be nice?
As she pulled back into the staff parking area, however, a sloppily parked vehicle taking up two spots made her heart thud. But why? It was just a little blue car. There were thousands of hatchbacks exactly like it on the road. In fact, there was one like it at River’s Sigh just the other day—the thought froze her in her seat.
“It’s a coincidence, just a coincidence,” she whispered, forcing her inert foot to accelerate lightly and her stiff hands to guide the wheel and turn in. “It’s a guest’s car, a guest’s.”
But then, before her brain could catch up with why, she killed the engine, threw off her seat belt, grabbed her phone from the dash and crashed out of her car. She sprinted to the back entrance, without bothering to grab her keys from the ignition or even to shut the driver side’s door.
Because what River’s Sigh guest would ever choose—would ever even know about—these inconvenient alley parking spaces? They wouldn’t. They’d park in the customer lot out front.
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Inside the long narrow hallway that opened from the back entrance and functioned as an overflow storage room, Katelyn removed her noisy click-clacking shoes, and forced herself to walk at a snail’s pace. Finally she was in the store front, sneaking around a ladder display of fuzzy fleece and her previously unsubstantiated fears took on shape and form: Steve’s shape. Steve’s muscular form.
His rage-gripped face, so terrifyingly familiar to her, was focused on someone else though. He hadn’t noticed her yet. It took Katelyn a beat or two to register what she was seeing. Then her whole body started to shake. Her limbs felt dangerously light while her center filled with lead, like all the blood from her extremities was pooling in her stomach.
“She is my wife.” The words scraped through gritted teeth. “Mine. You have no right to keep her from me.”
The side of Jayda’s face was flattened against the checkout counter, held fast by her long black hair, gripped punishingly in Steve’s left hand. His right hand white-knuckled a knife. Katelyn’s gorge rose and bile burned in her throat and nose. She forced herself to swallow against her gag reflex and prayed that the whining shriek making her ears bleed was only in her mind. You need to be quiet, stay very quiet, she cautioned herself. And be still. Very still.
Steve pressed the blade to the curve of Jayda’s smooth brown jaw, which glistened with perspiration, tears or both.
Jayda’s hazel eyes were wild and rolling. They fixed on Katelyn for a moment, but Katelyn didn’t know if she really saw her.
“That bitch is not worth it. I promise you. Just tell me where she is and you can go back to destroying families. Just. Not. Mine.”
In a series of steps that seemed to take years, Katelyn dragged her finger across the face of her phone to bring it to life. Then she pressed nine-one-one and hit Talk.
A yelp so soft it was almost nothing more than an intake of breath yanked Katelyn’s attention back to Jayda. A crimson line burst from a pinprick cut on her jawbone, followed the curve of her throat and raced toward her clavicle. Katelyn was so used to seeing Jayda working with trims and lace that for a moment her shocked brain registered the blood as ribbon and she almost admired the color against Jayda’s rich flesh.
“This is nine-one-one. What is your emergency?”
Everything seemed to simultaneously slow down and speed up from then on out. Katelyn, though she’d have no recollection of what she’d said or hadn’t said later, managed to get out the basics: ex-husband, knife, store name, address, hurry.
Steve’s concentration on Jayda broke the instant he heard Katelyn’s voice. He loosened his hold on her boss and turned to Katelyn, smiling with something that looked horribly like genuine joy.
“It’s time to set a few things straight, Kiki,” he said conversationally, starting toward her.
This was it. In the later years of their short marriage, she’d come to believe that while other women she knew might die tragically of cancer or shockingly in car accidents or even in some lovely way like from old age, she might die at the hands of her husband. Steve had seemed to sense—even enjoy—her fear, often murmuring, “Till death do us part, right?” when he kissed her hair or patted her shoulder after an “argument.” After she’d left him, she’d felt she’d gained a reprieve but not a pardon, sure that sometime, someday, he’d snap and she’d be there when he did.
The fear Katelyn constantly lived with and managed, that she occasionally thought of as an enemy, but more often considered a friend, grew from the mouse-sized skittering thing she always felt in Steve’s presence into a roaring beast.
She backed away fast, purposely upsetting fabric stands and shoving a rolling wooden box of cushions into his way. Steve kept coming, knife hand raised, but all rage in his expression long dissipated.
And then he was within an arm’s reach of her and there was nowhere to go, just the dead-end storage hall. She had no room inside for anything except terror—not even her recent lunch. Just as Steve lunged, she vomited violently, spraying coffee and half-digested food onto the reclaimed barn wood floor.
The slick sickness of her fear was Steve’s undoing. His foot slipped in the mess and he went down. He landed horrifically close to her. The dispatcher’s voice carried from Katelyn’s phone, asking her to hold on, saying there was a car on its way—and then Steve was up like a shot and out the door.
A swarm of police officers and ambulance attendants arrived, but Katelyn had lost her ability to distinguish individual faces. There could have been four uniformed people or forty. A cacophony of strident voices, all speaking with the practiced composure of emergency responders, battered her ears. She could still identify Jayda. Her boss. Still crying. Katelyn was addressed by her full legal name and told to stay put by someone with a calm, reassuring voice. Someone else was talking into a radio, trying to give directions about “the assailant” who’d left on foot.
“No, he . . . has a car, a blue car,” Katelyn said, but she didn’t make sense of much of the rest of the clamoring around her. She folded into a triangle, butt on floor, heels to butt, knees to chin, against the unpacked boxes of fall fabrics and dialed Aisha with trembling hands.
“Aisha, it’s me. Are you and the kids . . . all right? Are you okay?”
Aisha voice was concerned even as it reassured her. “We’re fine. We’re good. Why?”
“Uh, just checking in,” she managed to croak. “Keep the doors locked, please, and don’t let Steve in for any reason. I’ll be home soon, will explain then.” She clicked End before Aisha could say another thing and rang Brian—eyes closed, tears streaming. She found no words at all when he answered, “Hey, this is a nice surprise on a rotten day. What’s up?”
Chapter 30
Brian wanted to be anywhere but at his mother’s. No, that was false. He didn’t want to be anywhere. He wanted to be in one very specific place: Spring cabin with Katelyn—or, at the very furthest away, sitting in the main hall at River’s Sigh B & B, so he was close by in case she needed him. He was still having a hard time processing Friday’s events and even though it was Sunday now, it still felt more like a nightmare than reality. How could the cops still not have caught the guy? He couldn’t imagine how Katelyn was coping, but somehow she was. She even seemed like her normal self, just a bit quieter than usual and adamant about not leaving the kids’ sides. Which he totally understood. But Caren had called early in the morning, insisting she needed to see him about something “urgent.” Katelyn had been equally insistent that she would be fine for a few hours. So here he was, drinking tea with his mom—who wasted no time in getting down to what she considered the big emergency.
“I’ve heard a rumor that I’m hoping you’ll ease my mind about,” Caren said. “Tell me you’re not seeing the Kellerman woman.”
The Kellerman woman. It took Brian a second to figure out whom his mother was speaking about in such a disdainful tone. Katelyn. She meant Katelyn. But what was it to Caren if he was “seeing” Katelyn. Why on earth would she have a problem with Katelyn?
“Callum’s boarder, the one who makes her own clothes, has two kids?” Caren prodded.
Confused anger and defensiveness churned through Brian. How could Caren of all people fault a person for being creative? Or was it Katelyn’s motherhood status Caren found offensive?
“Who gave you that idea?”
Caren’s normally passive expression tightened and she ignored his question. “She’s not for you. She has a troubled marriage.”
Brian’s jaw dropped and after he gaped for a moment or two, he hooted with laughter. “Oh dear,” he said in a sarcastic, high-pitched voice, “not a ‘troubled’ marriage.”
“This isn’t a joking matter. It’s serious. She’s an abused wife.”
Apparently the Greenridge grapevine had been at work with lightning speed. He wondered what exactly his mother had heard about Steve’s visit to Got the Notion and about the rest of Katelyn’s life in general—and from whom? Not that it mattered. When it came to gossip
, no one was a reputable source. The nature of talking behind someone’s back precluded it.
Brian cracked his knuckles and pushed his tea away, feeling like he’d fallen into an episode of the Twilight Zone. “Okay, well, not that it’s any of your business, but Katelyn’s no longer his wife. She’s been legally separated for two years and has started divorce proceedings. And as for her being abused, I’m not sure why you sound like that’s her fault or is something to condemn her for.”
Caren frowned, clearly unmoved.
“And seriously,” Brian continued, “isn’t that a bit like the pot calling the kettle black?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“C’mon, Mom. Be real for once—you know, like you tried to be at that disastrous anniversary dinner when Cade and Noelle were visiting last summer. Channel that woman.”
“Your father has never hit me,” Caren hissed. “He would never hit me!”
“And that’s your measure of a healthy, ‘non-abusive’ relationship? That one person doesn’t hit another person?”
Caren’s already pale face had gone the color of skim milk and the freckles she used to always cover up and now never did stood out in sharp rust-colored blotches. Brian had the surreal thought that in some ways he was older than her now.
“I just want you to be happy.”
“No,” Brian said. “You want me to be single and biddable. Your little bachelor mama’s boy forever.”
“That isn’t fair.” Caren’s cornflower blue eyes filled. It was so rare, so unheard of, for his mother to cry, that Brian’s own throat burned.
“I love you, Mom, and I’m sorry if my words hurt, but I’ll date whoever I want to, and I won’t have you of all people giving me relationship advice.”
