Husband by Choice. Tara Quinn Taylor

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СКАЧАТЬ years, and I’m pretty sure this is the first time she’s ever sought help. Her youngest just left for college.

      Carly’s external bruises have healed. The left side of Latoya’s face is still too swollen for us to know what she really looks like.

      In counseling today Sara told us that it’s not just the few of us in shelters who feel so isolated—so cast apart. It’s one in four of those hundreds of women dropping their kids off at school every day, getting their nails done or walking the aisles in the grocery store.

      I know this stuff.

      And yet, today, I could feel the shock of the facts reverberate all the way through me. It was as though I’d heard them for the first time.

      Or rather, I felt them for the first time. And I knew I had to do what I could to help. I will make my life matter. Even if I am at the end of my life.

      I will share this, my attempt to fight back, with my sisters. In this diary. And maybe...someday...if Caleb wants to know more about his mama, someone will make these writings available to him.

      What a comfort that thought is to me. I am writing to help Caleb understand me someday. To understand the challenge I faced and the choice I made. I am not deserting you, Caleb. I am not walking out on you.

      You are not being abandoned! You are so loved, my little man. More than you will probably ever know. I need you to know that if I don’t make it through this, I am okay with that. I will die at peace because I died for you and your daddy. I died protecting you from a fiend I should never have brought into your lives.

      I undertake this job with the assurance that if I leave this earthly life, I will be watching over both of you from above. I will always be around, loving you, protecting you. I need you to know that....

      Tears dropped onto the pages and Jenna knew she had to stop. But although it was late, she still had many hours of darkness to endure. Her housemates were both in their rooms for the night. And if allowing Meredith to pour out her deepest heart, and some tears along with it, would help her—Jenna—to make it through the days, then so be it.

      She was only human.

      And so, with eyes blurring the script, she wrote long into the night. Completely sober, yet scribbling drunken-seeming avowals of the undying love she might never be able to express again. She wrote because she couldn’t sleep. She wrote to keep her sanity.

      She wrote because she missed her men so much she wasn’t sure that she could stay on top of the pain.

      * * *

      WHEN MAX GOT home from work Friday night, Chantel was there. She’d spent the night in his home more times than he could count during his marriage to Jill. His and Jill’s spare room had been dubbed Chantel’s room. She’d kept a toothbrush and change of clothes there.

      Her staying Thursday night had seemed a bit odd—and yet logical, too. There was no way he was going to send her out to find a hotel in Santa Raquel at midnight and it was even less acceptable to let her drive the three hours back to Las Sendas after spending the evening helping him try to track down Meri’s ex-husband. The guy had spent some time as an undercover cop. If he didn’t want to be found, finding him wasn’t going to be easy.

      Chantel was offering him professional expertise on her own time. Because it was what Jill would have wanted.

      She’d also cooked dinner for him and Caleb, as Max had discovered when he’d come into the house through the garage, his son on his hip, expecting to find a cold and deserted house, and finding, instead, a casserole in the oven and a plain-clothed cop poring over pages of reports on the laptop computer she’d set up at his kitchen table.

      Meri would never have put a computer on the dinner table.

      Dining came before business—always. Family before business—always. But now the business was finding Meri.

      Which was why, at ten o’clock Friday night, he and Chantel were still sitting at the kitchen table.

      She’d used her password-protected account to search crime databases and found seven Steve Smiths in the Las Vegas area who’d been charged with counts of domestic violence during the years Meri would have lived there.

      And was trying to connect any of them to the Steve Smith on Meri’s Las Vegas marriage and divorce records.

      There were one hundred and twenty Steve Smiths just in the North Las Vegas area.

      “None of the seven charged Smiths match up,” she said as soon as he finally got Caleb asleep two hours past his bedtime.

      It was the first they’d been able to speak freely since he’d arrived home. Caleb might not understand the significance of words, but he could very well remember them, and he wasn’t going to risk his son being adversely affected. Caleb was already showing signs of anxiety, just having Meri gone, without a bunch of adult-type talk involving police searches confusing him further. It wasn’t so much the words, Max knew, but the serious tone of their voices that would alarm him.

      “Two are in jail. One is dead. Three are still married to their spouses and living and working in Las Vegas. And a seventh moved to Massachusetts and is remarried. None of them were cops. Do you have any idea how old Meri’s ex is?”

      “Six years older than she, which would make him thirty-eight.”

      “None of these guys are thirty-eight.”

      Then they weren’t looking in the right place.

      “Are you sure she pressed charges against him?”

      Was he? He’d assumed she had. But had she actually said so? “She said that turning him in hadn’t helped,” he said, trying to remember her exact words. It wasn’t as though he and Meri sat around and discussed the abusive past that she was trying to leave behind.

      She’d been through counseling. And said that her best course was just to move forward. If she ever hoped to have a normal life she had to move on from being a victim.

      Or something like that. Those conversations had been more than four years ago. He’d taken away the pertinent facts and left the rest.

      Chantel changed screens. Typed.

      “I’m looking up restraining orders with any of her names on them.” He’d given her Meri’s aliases the night before. “If she filed something we can make an educated guess that the man she filed it against is Steve.” Chantel’s screen went blank before lists of green writing popped up. “I’m assuming she only had one abuser?”

      “That’s correct.” No doubt in his mind about that one. “And she did file a restraining order,” he said, remembering. “More than four years ago.” Steve Smith had been a curse in Meri’s life. And a threat to his life with Meri from the very beginning.

      One thing was certain, when they found the guy, he was going to pay.

      Even if he wasn’t immediately responsible for Meri’s disappearance, and he hoped to God he wasn’t, he was most definitely peripherally to blame. If not for Steve’s years of abuse and later hunting her down like an animal, Meri wouldn’t suffer from such paralyzing paranoia.

      “I’ve СКАЧАТЬ