Page 75 of Stay Away from Him

“I get it.” Melissa glanced again at the clock. “Look, Thomas has asked me to come meet him at the jail.”

“At the jail? Why?”

“I don’t know. But I’m going to go. I need to be there in a couple hours. But maybe before I go, I could check at some parks, parking lots, maybe take a quick walk through Rosedale Mall.”

Amelia nodded. “Go. I’ll drive around and look for them too.”

“Shouldn’t someone stay here, in case they decide to come home?”

Amelia shook her head. “I can’t stand it here. I need to do something. Besides, I’m afraid the press is going to be here soon. Set up camp outside the house in case Thomas makes bail, harass the neighbors with questions about whether they think he’s guilty. I don’t want to be here when they come.”

Melissa nodded—it made sense. Now that Amelia mentioned it, she’d like to get out of there too. She thought local reporters would love to get a shot of the woman Thomas Danver had been seen with around town. The woman he’d been captured on video proposing to, then beating the pulp out of her ex-husband.

The woman who screamed, begging him not to kill anyone.

***

Amelia and Melissa left separately. Melissa did what she said she was going to do: She looped the neighborhood, driving past some local parks and other places where two teenagers might hang out, then took a quick walk through Rosedale, the closest shopping mall. She didn’t see any sign of them—in fact the mall had only just recently opened its doors, stores still rolling up their metal cages and letting the day’s first customers in. She needed to leave soon if she was going to make it to the jail in time for her meeting with Thomas.

She went back to her car and set her phone’s GPS for the Ramsey County Correctional Facility—not a trip she ever imagined taking. The directions took her to a squat, forbidding stone-and-brick building at St. Paul’s eastern edge, plopped in the center of a broad, desolate field. She followed the signs for visitors, then went inside and followed a female guard’s terse instructions for signing in and passing through security checkpoints. She half expected to be taken to one of those rooms with webbed glass and a telephone, like in the movies, but the guard led her to a private room instead: square, with white cinder block walls. There, Thomas and a man in a suit sat waiting.

“Ms. Burke,” the well-dressed man said, rising from his chair and offering his hand. “We spoke on the phone.”

“Jon, could you see if we can get a cup of coffee or at least some water to drink?” Thomas asked. He was wearing the expected orange prison jumpsuit, which sat loose on his frame. He looked diminished, smaller somehow than he did just a day before, something timid and childlike in the way he sat at the metal table, his hands folded in his lap. Melissa could hardly recognize him—and, looking at him, she realized that she barely knew him at all.

The lawyer left without saying another word, and then they were alone. Melissa sat, and Thomas reached for her hands across the table. She snatched them away before he could touch her.

Thomas’s back slumped against his chair with a thud, a look of surprise and hurt on his face. “You’re mad at me, then?”

Melissa breathed hard through her nose, realizing in that moment just how angry she really was. Where to even begin?

“Why don’t you just tell me why you wanted to talk to me,” she suggested.

“I asked you a question last night,” Thomas said. “Before we were…interrupted.”

Melissa’s mouth fell open. “That’s what you want to talk about? Now? After everything that’s happened?”

“I need an answer,” Thomas said. His eyes glistened.

She felt herself taken back to that perfect, fragile moment on the pier—Thomas on his knee with a ring in his hands, the waves lapping gently around them, the ambering evening light glowing at her shoulders, the air crisp and clean. There was no getting back to there from where they were, no turning back the clock to make it play out differently. Now her answer to Thomas’s question had to comehere, in a cinder block room in the county jail.

“I can’t give you an answer,” she said. “Not here. Not like this.”

“Why not?” Thomas pleaded, his voice breaking with emotion. “I need your support now more than ever, Melissa. Things are happening, bad things, and I need to know that you still…that you love me.”

Of course I love you.The words were on her lips, and she was so tempted to just blurt them out. But something stopped her.Didshe still love him? She was certain that she did as recently as yesterday—butyesterdayfelt like a very long time ago.

“Melissa, you’re going to start hearing things,” Thomas said, dropping his gaze with shame. “It’s about more than this assault, now. The charges of murder—they’re coming back.”

“I know,” she said.

Thomas’s eyes snapped up to her. “You know?”

This wasn’t the time to admit that she’d been talking to Kelli Walker and Derek Gordon—Thomas’s enemies. “It’s already on the news,” she said instead.

“Then you know why this is so important,” Thomas said. “Melissa, I’m on video proposing to you. People know that we’re together. For you to leave me now, to turn down my proposal—it would make me look guilty. But if there was a woman standing by me, sitting behind me in that courtroom, supporting me…”

She gasped and rose to her feet, her chair clattering to the floor behind her. She turned and walked to the door, her hands rising to the sides of her face. She swept them through her hair in a rapid movement, then turned back to Thomas, suddenly furious.

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