Page 25 of A Very Happy Halloween

“I wanted to bring you here the night we ended up at the nature reserve, but Grandma was holding a bridge party, and I thought we’d have more time.” He brought the back of my hand to his lips. “I thought we’d have so much more time.”

We ate sushi under the stars, and we talked. Eis kept his promise not to rush things and instead pointed out the different constellations as we lay on the sofa, my head nestled against his shoulder. It reminded me of our first night together, just without the sex or the peeing-in-a-bush parts.

“This is the first evening in I-can’t-remember-how-long that I’ve taken an hour to do nothing,” I confessed. “It’s weird.”

“That’s a feeling I understand. Fifteen months ago, I never had a moment to myself, and then suddenly I had all the time in the world.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“I realise now that my old life wasn’t the one I wanted, but that didn’t make losing it easy.”

“That’s a feeling I understand. I hadn’t been happy for a long time, but the idea of starting again from nothing was terrifying.”

“What do you miss from your old life?”

Nobody had ever asked me that before. “I guess…I guess the security. Although we were living in a house of cards, I know that now. Steven dealt with the finances, and it was a mess. Probably still is a mess. My solicitor helped me to take my name off all the joint stuff, but my credit rating is shot to pieces.” I sighed. “So, what does that leave? Social status, maybe. People look at you differently when you’re a wife. As if it’s something to aspire to.”

“We’re not so different, you and me.”

“Oh, please. Your roof is actually designed to be open to the elements.”

Eis laughed and rolled onto his side to face me. “People looked at me differently when I was a champion compared to when I was a victim.”

“You still are a champion. Nobody can take that away from you.”

He shrugged one shoulder. “Big pieces of my life vanished overnight. My ex came to visit me in the hospital the day after it happened. Once. She came once, and after she left, she called Edie and told her that ‘this wasn’t what I signed up for.’”

“She broke up with you via your sister?”

“Makes sending a text message seem classy, huh?”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “Don’t go there.”

“It was worth a try.”

“You couldn’t continue with your career?”

“Not with the amount of peripheral vision I have at the moment. I need to see a move coming and have time to react. Mostly, I’m watching the guy’s waist, but I also need to be aware of the cage, the ref, his hands…”

“I hate that you lost something you love.”

Eis brushed my hair away from my face. “When I got out of prison, I was so fucking angry. Every time I went into the cage, I imagined I was facing Neil Short. You know who he is?”

“The man who forced himself on your sister?”

“Yeah, but he was no man. He was scum. I let that anger fuel me, and that’s why I won every fight. He’d taken two years of my life, but worst of all, he’d taken you.”

There was so much unbearable agony in Eis’s voice that my heart broke all over again. If I ever met Neil Short, I’d be at risk of doing jail time too.

“But I’m here now. And Neil Short is in prison, isn’t he?”

Eis nodded. “Every single one of my gyms offers free self-defence courses for women and free safety classes for kids. Stranger danger and all that. Short tried his shit on a woman my team had trained, and she put him in the hospital. Plus Edie bankrupted him in the civil trial.”

“Good for them.”

“None of that makes up for what he did, but I don’t feel the all-consuming rage anymore. Maybe I lost my edge?”

“What about the man who threw acid on you? You can’t picture his face instead?”

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