Page 40 of After Hours

She let out a shaky sort of breath. “It started the minute we got in the hotel room. He just… changed. At the time I thought it was like he became a different person, but over time I realized that was the real person. That the man I’d met was the mask.” A sound escaped her, some kind of laugh—though it was hollow. “He knew how to pick his victims, that’s for sure. Because I’d never had family that was mine. I’d never had anyone. He was all I had. I think he picked me because he knew that no matter what he did, I wouldn’t leave. And he was right.”

Romily only realized the tears were leaking from the corners of her eyes when she felt them pull in the place where Zachary’s palm still fit tight to her cheek.

“He didn’t hit me at first,” she told him, and she felt Zachary’s hand tense, ever so slightly. She thought maybe she should stop—but she couldn’t. She wanted it all out. “I’d like to think that if he had right off the bat I would have left, but the reality is that I don’t think I would have. I think I would have convinced myself it was a one-off. Or my fault. He didn’t hit me in the beginning. But the thing is, he didn’t have to.”

She heard herself sniffle, but there was no helping it. Except she heard a low sort of rumble from Zachary, a kind of soothing reminder that this was nothing now but a story she was telling. And that he was with her.

It turned out, that helped a lot.

“He ripped me apart,” she told him. “Everything I did was wrong.Iwas wrong. That was how it worked, especially as time went on. He never told me not to do something, he just made sure that if I did the thing he didn’t like it was so unpleasant afterward that I never did it again. It took a while to build to actual violence. First he just threw objects. Then there was a slap here or there.”

Again, Zachary tensed. This time, it made her smile. Because if anyone could storm her own memories to defend her from the past, it would be her Viking.

“Nothing was all that damaging, just painful and upsetting. He liked to degrade me. Humiliate me. And hurt me, but never in ways that turned any of that pain into pleasure. If that makes sense.”

“It does,” Zachary told her, sounding matter-of-fact. Absolutely certain. “And I find you even more remarkable than I already did, my little bird.”

Then suddenly, she felt bright again. Strong. Joseph had made her tiny and scared, filled with doubt and shame. Zachary made her tough and resilient, and best of all, safe.

Or maybe it was that Zachary made her feel likeherself,at last.

She kept going. “The first year of our marriage, I was in denial. I kept thinking I could make it better, but I couldn’t. No matter what I did, it got worse. He claimed that was my fault, of course. I thought he might be right. He made me quit my job. He didn’t understand why I wanted to leave the house without him unless it was to cheat, when I had never cheated. I had to defend everything and he made it seem like I was crazy for wanting to do those things—like go on a walk—and put our marriage at risk.”

“Breathe,” Zachary told her, his voice low and easy, penetrating the cloud of memory.

He made it almost easy to keep telling this story. Romily reminded herself that there was a happy ending already—she ended up here, with him. Not stuck in that hell with Joseph.

“The second year, everything escalated,” she told Zachary. “He isolated me from what few friends I had left. He moved us out into a sterile, featureless community outside of the city, where was hard to meet any women my age who weren’t alreadymothers. That was deliberate, because he was very clear that it was my fault we didn’t have children.”

Her mouth felt dry. She swallowed, but kept going. “Every month when I got my period it would set him off. It got worse and worse by the month. By the end of third year, after I’d spent some time trying to make friends where we lived and Joseph had made sure that none of those relationships could possibly last, I busy cleaning the house one day. He had been mad at me for days, so I was trying to do a particularly good job. I cleaned everywhere, even in places I normally didn’t pay much attention to. I was proving I wasn’t lazy.”

Zachary laughed. “You are hardly lazy, Romily.”

That made her smile, but it faded as she went on. “I found this box of his that he said he kept his old high school things in. I didn’t even know what that meant. He’d never showed me, anyhigh school thingsand I was too cowed by him to go look. That day was different.”

She knew why it was different. It was because she’d gotten her period in the night and Joseph had kicked her in the stomach. The force of the kick had sent her tumbling off the side of their bed, onto the floor. She’d been bruised. Disoriented—but she knew better than to try to crawl back in that bed. Or to move.

That was the day that she’d laid there, dazed and half-naked on the floor of her bedroom while her husband stood over her and ranted down at her, one terrible thing after the next. Then he’d kicked her again and walked out.

It was the first time she had thought, with perfect clarity and very little emotion,one day, he’s going to kill me.

“He roughed me up in the morning before he left for work, and I think I was feeling desperate,” she told Zachary, and heard his low growl. “And that was when I found it.” She laughed, but not because it was funny. Is it still wasn’t. “It was a box of his medical records. His tonsils out when he was aboy. An appendectomy when he was older. Most importantly, a vasectomy.He’d had it done before he met. Meaning that he’d never wanted children—he just wanted me to suffer.”

Again, she would have given anything to see the look on Zachary’s face. All she could feel was the way his thumb moved against her cheek, but she found that was enough.

It was everything.

“So every single month of him raging at my failing to get pregnant when he knew I wouldn’t…” She shook her head a little bit. “It’s so psychotic that I don’t even know what to say about it.”

“I can think of a few things,” Zachary said in a low voice, and Romily could hear the temper in his voice. Maybe it was wrong, but that made her feel safe too.

“It took me another year to plan my escape,” she went on. “I had to be so careful. He controlled everything. Me, of course, but also the money and everything in the house. Still, if I was very careful, very deliberate, I could skim a tiny bit here and a tiny bit there and it all added up over time.”

“And you did it.”

“I did.” She loved the approval in his voice. It washed over her like a caress. “I walked out of the house one day and I never went back. I didn’t take anything with me. There was no point. I left behind anything he could trace. I only took the clothes on my back and my license. That was it. I used the cash that I had stashed away and I took BART into San Francisco, and after that, it was easy to disappear. I knew he thought I was weak and scared and fragile, so I went to the last place he’d ever think to look for me.”

She blew out a breath, because she could feel herself getting shaky. “I remembered this Marina particularly, because back when I first moved here from Modesto, I lived for about a week or so in one of the squatter marinas. I knew there was a wholesubculture on the water. The way I remembered it, was filled with the kind of people who didn’t want to be found. I thought that sounded perfect.”

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