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 convinced 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: