Angie’s eyes welled up with tears that quickly spilled over.
I didn’t understand her. I genuinely didn’t get why she was trying. She clearly didn’t see why going behind my back to contact my mother had been so horrible, so in her eyes, I was doing the betraying. I was the one who’d wrecked our marriage. I was the guilty piece of shit who’d cheated on her, called her names, and taken my anger out on her. Why did she accept it?
“I will never forgive you for what you did,” I heard myself saying, and my throat started closing up. “I had to see her the other day. My mother—I drove down to see her. She called me a weak dog.”
Angie drew a shaky breath and refocused, her brows pinching together. “You saw your mom?”
That set me off. Without warning. “That’s what I just said, you stupid bitch!” I yelled. Ignoring how I’d startled her, I approached her instead, and I couldn’t stop the words from tumbling out of my fucking mouth. “I guess she was in a nostalgic mood because she wanted to reminisce about the times she’d forced Finn and me to play hide-and-seek. And she couldn’t grasp why I hid in the closet, shaking like a leaf, knowing that she was going to turn either my back or Finn’s into a bloody slip ‘n slide with whatever tool she found.”
“I didn’t know it was that bad,” she cried. Not for the first time. It was the same song and dance. “She was so remorseful when I talked to her!”
“That’s what she does!” I growled. “I fucking warned you. I told you she’d fool you. She’s sick—don’t you get that?” I jabbed a finger at her temple and backed her up against a wall. “You don’t get to say that you didn’t know it was that bad, because I told you everything. You knew about the games—you’ve seen my back. You’ve seen this.” I held up my fists. My knuckles. “How can you ever think that deranged woman is worth forgiveness? The first time she put out a cigarette on my skin, I was four years old!”
Angie sobbed her heart out, covering her face with her hands.
I didn’t have an ounce of pity in me.
Her good intentions didn’t matter.
“I told you,” I repeated in a voice I barely recognized. It was all rasp and despair, and I didn’t wanna hear it. “You gave me your word, and you fucked me over. My own wife. The first person I opened up to.” My vision blurred with burning hatred and tears. “You were supposed to be on my side!” Overcome with white-hot rage, I slammed a fist into the wall right next to her.
“Stop!” she cried. “Please stop, Avery!”
“Oh, you want me to listen to you?” I asked. “Because when I asked you to stop, over and over, you didn’t. You didn’t listen to me.”
“I’m sorry,” she choked out.
“No—fuck you.” I grabbed ahold of her shoulders and started shaking her. And at that point, I left my own body. I didn’t know what I was doing. I had no control whatsoever, and I saw two faces in front of me. You were supposed to protect me. I saw my mother. I saw my wife. You were supposed to stand by me. I heard myself yell at them both as I got rougher and rougher—and as I slipped further away from reality.
The indistinct images exploded into shrapnel that pierced through me, and I couldn’t breathe. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I was fairly sure I heard sirens.
Fuck my life.
I staggered back and bent over, grasping at my knees. I couldn’t see, I couldn’t force air into my lungs, I couldn’t hear, I couldn’t feel anything other than this gut-wrenching, panic-tinged pain.
“Becker!”
I cast a look at the barred door as an officer pulled out his keys and told me I was free to go.
My cellmate hadn’t sobered up yet and was pretty dead to the world.
“You’re lucky the prosecutor chose to listen to your wife,” the officer told me.
Lucky. Great word to describe me.
I caught sight of my reflection in a mirrored door we walked through on the way out, and I quickly averted my gaze. Thirty-six hours in detention had sobered me up, effectively removing the blinders to my own appearance. I smelled like I hadn’t showered in five days, which was fairly accurate. The shadows under my eyes had never been so pronounced, my clothes were wrinkled and stained, and every muscle in my body protested.
I received an envelope with my car key, phone, shades, wallet, along with a scripted speech on where I could pick up my car, which had been impounded after my arrest.
Fucking wonderful.
Seeing that my phone battery had died, I asked if there was a payphone somewhere.
“Thank you for coming.”
“Of course.” Ethan gave me a once-over before lifting a brow.
“Long story,” I muttered. I climbed into his truck and scrubbed tiredly at my face. “You don’t happen to know a good attorney, do you? I’m divorcing the only one I know.”
I’d fucked myself over properly this time. Given the nature of the arrest, I knew I could face issues at work. But before I informed Phil, the school’s principal, and thankfully, a friend of mine, I wanted an attorney to get started on the process of having my record expunged.
Ethan frowned and side-eyed me as he pulled away from the curb. “I’m not my brothers, Ave. Unlike them, I ask questions. Are you okay?”
“I…” I blew out a breath and rubbed at my temples. “Not really, but I will be. I crossed a line with Angie.” Instead of subjecting me to a firing squad of judgment, he seemed to be waiting patiently for me to continue. It mattered. “I’ve been asking her to leave me alone, but she kept texting and calling. She wanted closure, or whatever the fuck. So, I went over to her place when I shouldn’t have.” I swallowed and let my hands fall to my lap. “We argued, and…I guess I got rough with her. I shook her—grabbed her too hard—and the police were already on their way by then.”
Ethan grunted and stopped at a red light. “She’s all right, I take it?”
I peered out the window on my side and nodded absently. Summer was in full swing, and tourists had invaded our town. “She has some minor bruising on her arms. She came down to speak to the officers and the prosecutor…”
I’d seen her briefly yesterday. She’d told me she didn’t want to press charges; she tried to explain that she’d just been scared, and I couldn’t exactly blame her. I’d gone too far. Not that it changed anything. I hated her with every fiber of my being, and I told her I didn’t want to see her again. At long last, she appeared to understand.
I explained things as well as I could to Ethan, without going into too much detail about the hell that had brought us here.
Darius and Jake knew my brother and I had grown up in foster care—and that we’d had a less-than-loving mother before then—and Darius had pieced together a few more fractions of the aforementioned hell over the years. I remembered one time, we’d been in the sauna after a heavy workout, and he’d nodded at one of the scars on my back and asked, “Single-tail whip?”
Just a short sentence.
I’d nodded with a dip of my chin.
For months, that barely there conversation had been on my mind, until one night we were at the bar, and I couldn’t prevent myself from saying, “It was just one time. My mother preferred to burn me or use a leather belt.”