No River Too Wide. Emilie Richards

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СКАЧАТЬ couldn’t wait for even one more breath. Blindly she slid along the wall, judging the distance to the telephone, judging it incorrectly, as it turned out. She nudged the table with her hip well before she thought she would get there. The phone fell out of the cradle to the table, then to the floor.

      She might as well have set off a bomb.

      With a soft cry Jan fell to her knees and searched for the phone in the darkness. But it wasn’t dark for long.

      “Jan? Is that you?”

      Jan jumped up. “Get in your room and lock your door!”

      Taylor, whose room was on the other side of the kitchen, came out instead and turned on the kitchen light, nearly blinding Jan. Taylor sounded sleepy. “What’s going on?”

      Jan searched wildly for the intruder. Taylor walked right past the spot where Jan had imagined him, her sleepy face screwed up in question.

      “Are you okay?”

      “There’s somebody in the house!”

      Taylor looked around, then walked to the wall and flipped a switch, and the hallway, too, was suddenly bright with light.

      “Were you dreaming?” she asked.

      “No!” Jan took her arm. “I heard—”

      Another crash from the kitchen. She stepped forward to shield Taylor, but nobody was there.

      “Is that what you heard?” Taylor put her hand gently over Jan’s and left it there. “Listen, that’s our ice maker. It scared me at first, too, until I figured out what it was. Sometimes it’s perfectly quiet, and sometimes like tonight the darned thing sounds like Godzilla trampling Manhattan, but honestly, it’s harmless. I even had the repair guy out to look at it, but he said it’s this particular model and they’re all like that. There’s nothing we can do about it except replace it with something more expensive.”

      “Ice maker?”

      “It’s awful, I know. I’m sorry. I would have warned you, but I just didn’t think about it. Maybe I ought to disconnect it.” Taylor paused. “What were you going to do out here?”

      “Call 911.”

      “Glad you didn’t, although it would have made their night, I’m sure.”

      Jan felt tears filling her eyes, then, despite her best efforts, slipping down her cheeks.

      “Hey.” Taylor put her arm around her. “I’m so sorry. You must have been terrified. Did you think your ex had found you?”

      Jan had never thought of Rex that way. Her ex. Not officially, of course. How did you divorce a man without revealing your whereabouts? But in every other way...?

      She nodded, as much to her own question as to Taylor’s. “I was afraid.” She sniffed. “He might hurt you.”

      “If you believed that, you were beyond brave to come out into the hall and try to make the call.”

      “Please, I’m sorry I woke you. But can we check around a little, just to be sure?”

      “We’ll check. Then I’m making us some herbal tea.” When Jan began to protest, Taylor stopped her. “We both need it. Humor me, okay? Grab the phone and get ready to dial if we need to.”

      Ten minutes later Jan was sitting on the sofa beside Taylor sipping a steaming cup of chamomile and mint tea. She wasn’t sure what made her feel worse. Believing that an ice maker was an intruder? Waking Taylor from a sound sleep? The knowledge that for the rest of her life every unexpected noise would make her tremble this way?

      “My parents were complete opposites,” Taylor said. “My father’s unbelievably tactful and understanding. My mother was blunt to a fault. If she thought something needed to be said, she said it.”

      Jan wondered where she herself fit on that spectrum. Her job as a parent had been to soften everything her husband did or said. But if she hadn’t married Rex, who would she be?

      “I’m more like Mom,” Taylor continued. “I’ve tried to be more like my dad, but so far I haven’t been too successful. Tonight, though, I’m going to be Mom. You’ve been through so much, Jan. More than most people could handle. I know it’s marked you. You don’t have to tell me. How could it not? I just wonder if you need to talk to somebody who could help you make this transition. Somebody who could listen and guide you through the worst.”

      “A shrink?” Jan managed a laugh. “He would think I was so crazy for staying with Rex all those years, he would probably lock me away.”

      “Domestic abuse is never simple. He or she would know that, and it’s not a shrink’s job to judge you, anyway. But actually I was thinking of a friend of Harmony’s and mine, one of the goddesses. Her name is Analiese, and she’s a minister.”

      “I went to my own minister once, and I told him what was going on at home. I thought he would help me work out what to do. He told me it was my job to stay with Rex and make him happy, that like Daniel, a good wife would find a way to tame the lion in her den, so I just needed to be a good wife.”

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