Page 60 of Surviving You, Scotch and Sammy 1

Footsteps stomp down the hall, then my mom and I both stiffly look up as Dad looks down at us both. His face is worn and wrinkled when it normally isn’t. His blue eyes are in mourning, and his shoulders droop with fatigue. He unlocks the cell, and as though the fact he possesses the keys pains him, he quickly slides the lock open and pockets them. “Come on. Lets go home.”

“What’s happening?”

“Ricardo’s pressing charges, but for now, you’re free to leave.”

“Pressing charges? He has my wife!”

My mom sniffles at my words, and guilt lances through my gut at all the secrets I’ve kept from them the last week. I hold her hand in mine, and marvel at the fact I never noticed the day my hand became bigger than hers. It wasn’t, and now it is.

“He said he…” my voice cracks and my mom sobs. “He said he ‘took care of it.’ Did he say anything else about that, Dad? He said they got rid of my baby.”

Dad walks beside us as we emerge into the office space of the police station, and as his coworkers look at us in sympathy. He waits until we step outside before he turns back to me. “Yeah, he said the same thing to me.”

“She wouldn’t--”

“I dunno, Sam. I can’t prove one way or the other. I can’t access her medical files.”

“What do I do?”

“Maybe wait a few days? Wait for her to call you.”

“Dad!”

“You can’t step foot on his property. He’s had you charged with assault, Sam. That’s not a small deal. He’s a damn lawyer! He’s gonna push this as far as he can. You need to stay away.”

“I can’t stay away from her!”

“It’s time to flex some willpower. You need to wait for her to come to you. You can’t go to her. You believe she didn’t do what he said she did, so you have faith and you wait.”

“But she’s my wife. I have to have rights!”

“She’s on his property. That’s all there is to it. Wait until she steps out. Wait until she goes to Dixies, but you can’t go to her.”

We drive home in silence, as I breathe deeply and attempt to control the nausea in my gut. Ironic, since my poor sweet Sammy was fighting the same demons this time yesterday. The band all sit around my kitchen table speaking in hushed tones, and my oldest brother Alex and his best friend make everyone coffee in stony silence. The girls play around the kitchen, oblivious to the tension in the room, and though I appreciate the show of solidarity, I walk past the group until I reach the back counter and my phone charger.

I plug my now dead cell in, and will the little red power bar to charge and switch my phone on.

“Wanna talk about it?” Alex asks softly. “Seems to me we missed a lot of news this week.”

I drop my head into my hands. “I’m sorry, guys. I know I let you all down.”

“We would have liked an invitation to the wedding,” my mom whispers close beside me. “I might have tried to talk you out of it, but if it was going to happen, I would have liked to have been there.”

I sigh and take her under my left arm. “I’m sorry. It’s been a big week, and we weren’t really thinking about everyone else.”

“You can trust us with anything. You know that, right?”

I nod as tears well in my eyes. I’m fucking exhausted. I’m emotional. I’m grieving the fact Sammy and I should have been curled up naked in our own bed right now. “I know. This wasn’t about you guys. This was about exactly what happened this afternoon. She knew her folks wouldn’t allow us to happen. Yet somehow they still fucked it up.”

“You don’t think she--”

“No.” Angelo snaps and cuts Luc off. “No, she didn’t. Her daddy is full of shit. She was sick and miserable, and she was scared, but she didn’t do what he’s saying she did.”

I think I might die if she did.

My phone dings from behind me, so I spin and snatch it up, almost sobbing and falling into my mom in relief. Sammy’s name pops up, two, three, four times.

“It’s her.”

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