Page 46 of Deliver Me

Mia blushed, heat rushing painfully over her cheeks. “I love him,” she said honestly. “So much.”

“Yeah?” Brittany flicked a glance at Mia’s face again and then shook her head. “Well, come in then and explain to me how the hell that happened when he’s been in prison for the last thirteen years. I know you weren’t with him when he went in. You look like a baby, and they’d have had your face all over the news if you had been.”

Mia stiffened. “I’m not a baby. I’m twenty-one and I’m in college.”

“Well, aren’t you a fierce little thing? I can see how he’d like you.” Brittany smiled as she settled at the kitchen table, waving a hand for Mia to sit, too. “So?”

Mia took a breath and explained how her relationship with Gabriel had begun, how hopeful she had been when they realized that they might have a chance to actually be together and how hard the past year had been on both of them.

“You really do love him,” Brittany said when she’d finished. “I can see it all over you. I’m glad. He deserves to be loved.”

Mia nodded, nibbling the skin of her bottom lip nervously. “Did you? Love him?”

“As much as I could at fifteen,” Brittany said, but the look in her eyes was haunted, and Mia could see it, the ache that she kept deep inside, the place where there was a wound that still wept. “I was emotional—maybe a bit out of control—as a teenager. I landed at Richard’s and that just made it worse.”

Mia nodded. “He told me about what you all went through.”

Heat flashed in Brittany’s eyes, but she shrugged. “He’s got as much right as any of us to share it, I guess.”

“I can’t imagine what it was like,” Mia said softly, reaching out to lay her hand over the other woman’s. Brittany’s fingers tightened on it, seeking comfort as she confronted memories that they both knew she would’ve preferred to forget. “The truth is that none of that should have happened to you, to either of you, and this is a small chance to help make it right for Gabriel.”

“I told him I hated him, the last time I saw him.” Brittany looked up, a single tear sliding unnoticed down her cheek as she chewed nervously on her thumbnail. “That I would never forgive him for what had been done to me, even though it wasn’t his fault and there was nothing he could have done to stop it.”

They both turned as a small boy clattered down the stairs, arms full of toys. He waved curiously and smiled, one tooth missing in the front, before letting himself out into the backyard through the patio door.

“Gabriel wanted children. Did you know that?” She looked at Mia, shoulders slumped with a sadness that years of distance could not erase. “Even then, as young as we were, he wanted a real family. The kind where love was just given, instead of earned, and you knew they’d always be there for you.”

Mia squeezed her hand, but she didn’t interrupt.

“I love my husband,” Brittany continued, nodding slightly to herself. “I love my son, too, and I wouldn’t undo the life I had to live to get here.” There was a spark in her eyes, the rage that she’s concealed so well until now. “But someone needs to know what that bastard did, and I guess I need to make up for blaming the wrong person all those years ago. Gabriel was just a kid, and he was half mad with grief and rage when he took off. What happened to his dad was a tragedy, but it was probably Richard’s fault more than anyone’s.”

“Will you help him?”

Brittany nodded and Mia breathed a sigh of relief even as her heart ached. Gabriel had loved this woman years before Mia had known him and maybe it wouldn’t have lasted, but what they had made together shouldn’t have been taken from them by force. The unfairness of that, the damage that it had left behind, would never completely heal.

She understood, finally, that even if Gabriel came home any happiness they found together afterward would still be built on the back of someone else’s pain.

Chapter Nineteen

Summer

Mia’s fingers were white at the knuckle when her father parked the car in the courthouse parking lot. It was full, midweek bringing people dealing with marriage licenses and parking tickets, jury duty and drug court. The truly unlucky ones, the ones like her, were here for the court to decide on consequences most people would find unimaginable. Some of the people who had come to watch those proceedings would leave with their loved ones, others with tears and empty arms.

Her dad put the car in park and then waited in supportive silence as she tried to slow her breathing and bring her racing heart under control. He’d insisted on driving, on picking her up every day at her newly leased apartment so that she wouldn’t have to face the car ride away from the courthouse alone. She was grateful, honestly unsure if she’d be able to drive herself home if the jury re-convicted Gabriel and he was sentenced to life again. If they left her without hope.

She flicked open the mirror in the visor, checked the minimal makeup that she’d tried to apply, and sighed. She’d dressed carefully that morning—hair in a sophisticated twist, blackskirt carefully pressed, heels low and sensible—but after several nights without sleep there was no makeup that could cover the dark circles exhaustion had drawn under her eyes.

Fear twisted in her stomach, a low roll of nausea that threatened to overwhelm her, but she smiled at her father reassuringly as she reached the door handle.

“It’s probably Lilly or Brittany checking to see if we made it,” Mia mumbled as her phone started to vibrate in her bag. There weren’t many people Gabriel could count on, and the few who were coming had all agreed to meet once they arrived at the building.

“Did you drive by the front of the courthouse on your way in?” Lilly asked when she answered. Her voice was hushed, likely inside the courthouse already, but tense and worried.

Mia frowned, brow creasing in concern. “No, why?”

“There’s reporters everywhere,” Lilly told her. “They swarmed us when we came in. I don’t know what’s going on, but we had to make a run for it to get inside. Luckily, security isn’t letting them in the building.”

Mia stopped and looked around, the stiff fabric of her suit already wilting in the early summer heat as it glinted viciously off the glass of parked cars and looming office windows. The parking lot was around the corner of the large courthouse building, out of sight of the main doors. She assumed they were waiting there since there was no other way for visitors to get inside.

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