Page 39 of A Lonely Road
I recognized this moment for what it was—another wall crumbling between us, another thorny hedge set ablaze. “You can tell me anything, Nora, I hope you know that.”
She nodded. “Like I mentioned, I was a Navy brat. We moved around a lot. I didn’t mind so much, but for my mom, it was pretty lonely. As soon as I left for college, she split. Asked for a divorce, packed up her stuff, and moved out. My dad wasn’t even in the country at the time.”
“Ouch,” I murmured.
“It gets worse,” she said, sighing. “College was where I discovered I worked really well with noise around me, so I let my friends drag me to bars—they’d drink and flirt, I’d write papers in a corner. One night, though, this guy approached me, asked me out, didn’t want to take no for an answer. His name was Shawn Milton. My friends noticed that he wasn’t taking a hint and brought the guys they were talking to over to scare him off.”
Anger simmered across my skin, but I kept it together and nodded for her to go on.
“Things escalated. He had his hand wrapped around my elbow, but when he saw the guys coming, he grabbed my wrist to try to yank me out of the bar. I fought him, but I had no training of any kind back then, and we were almost to the door when the group reached us.”
“Christ,” I whispered. “No wonder you reacted the way you did atThe Mermaid.”
She gave a weak smile. “Yeah. I thought my friends were going to be too late. I’ve never felt so helpless in my life, and I never wanted to feel that way again.”
“I take it they made it in time?”
“Barely. He shoved me into a table and ran when they got close. Then he moved on . . . to my mom. I found out she’d hooked up with him a few months later. I have no idea if he sought her out because of me, or how he even found her. Maybe it was a coincidence.”
My brows drew together. “Pretty big coincidence.”
“Yeah. When I told her about that night, she brushed it off. She told me he made her feel young again. I got my own apartment at the end of freshman year and didn’t make a lot of effort to see her—Shawn gave me the creeps, and my dad was devastated by the divorce. You’d think at nineteen, it wouldn’t feel like you had to choose between your parents, you know? But maybe if I’d visited her more, I might've seen it sooner.”
I lifted my hand from the cushions and stroked her hair. “Might have seen what?”
“The signs. The little ways he took control of her, the manipulations. We weren’t all that close, but she’d always called or emailed a couple times a week when I first left for school. It slowly tapered off to a short email once a month, and eventually I started to think it was Shawn writing them instead of her.”
My muscles tensed. “He was abusing her?”
“Physically, I don’t think so, but I still don’t know for sure. Something weird was definitely going on, though.”
“Right.” I forced my jaw to unclench. “Go on.”
“One night when I spoke to her on the phone, he wasn’t there, which almost never happened. She mentioned Shawn borrowing money and asking for joint bank accounts. I managed to convince her it wasn’t a good idea. She had money socked away from the sale of the house after the divorce, not a ton, but enough to keep her afloat.”
Dread weighed me down at the direction this story was taking, but I knew Nora needed to get it out. I pressed my lips to her temple and waited, listening to the way her breath trembled past her lips.
“I brought it up to my father when I went out to see him about a week later, but we were too late.” When she paused, I squeezed her hand gently and she closed her eyes. “Shawn flew into a rage when she wouldn’t give him access to her accounts. He trashed the apartment and disappeared with all of her cash and valuables. He tried to clean out her savings even though he wasn’t added to the account, but the bank wouldn’t let him make a withdrawal.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“She was devastated. She blamed me for ‘upsetting him’ and refused to speak to me for months. Even now, we barely talk.”
“You saved her from being scammed and she blamed you for him being an asshole?”
“Pretty much.”
I shifted to pull her onto my lap and wrapped my arms firmly around her. My own parents were recently retired and travelingthe world together, but we were all so close. It was hard for me to imagine facing something like that, especially at such a young age.
“Holy hell,” I muttered. “Oh Nora, I’m so sorry.”
She nodded against my chest. “He’s why I took the self-defense classes. And why I overreacted when that guy grabbed me at The Mermaid. It’s hard to forget how the apartment looked when we got there. It was like a scene from a horror movie. I thought we were going to find her—”
Dead.The unspoken word hung in the air as my arms tightened around her. “She was okay though? He didn’t hurt her?”
“She was terrified . . . and then she was pissed. My dad wanted to help sort out the apartment, at least, but she wouldn’t let us do anything. Eventually, it seemed like our presence did more harm than good, so we left. It was almost a year before she spoke to me again, and that was to tell me she was marrying some other guy she’d just met. I wasn’t invited to the wedding. I tried to keep in touch for a few years, but eventually I just gave up.”
For a long time, I simply held her. My mind raced as I processed all she'd said, trying to piece together all the things I knew—and the things IthoughtI’d known about her. It had been clear from the start that she’d suffered some past trauma, but this was beyond anything I’d imagined.
