Page 31 of Traces Of You
“I didn’t ask and don’t want to know. Everything they helped me with was legal. They helped me buy a car and let me store it there so Oliver didn’t know. It’s registered under my name. You know that.”
He wanted to run the plates, but instead pulled her registration out of her glove box to assure it was in her name. Until he knew more, he couldn’t risk it.
“Why not take public transportation?” he asked. “Pay cash and take buses.”
“I can’t carry much stuff with me then,” she said. “And when I got to the border, I wasn’t sure where I’d end up. It sounds stupid, but I needed that freedom. And everything I’d been buying to leave with was in that car so I didn’t have to pack when the time came.”
“How much stuff do you have?”
“You mean you didn’t look when I was in the shower?”
She was challenging him.
“I glanced in the bedroom. There were some clothes hanging in the closet. I looked more to see if you unpacked.”
Keeping everything in her car meant it’d be easier for her to up and go.
“I did. What I had. Which isn’t much. I left everything else behind. Everything with me is new.”
“They might not think you’re missing with your purse and ID gone,” he said.
She blinked at him a few times. “I left them behind.”
She hadn’t told him that. “So you’ve got no ID on you?”
She walked into her bedroom and brought out the purse he’d seen she’d had in the diner this morning.
How had it only been this morning when she’d entered his life again?
Her wallet was out and her license and SS card were shown to him, even her Canadian passport.
“You had duplicates?”
“Yes. I knew the day would come that I might need to leave like this. I hoped not, but I had long since given up. I said I lost my license and paid for another. Did the same with my social security card. You’re the first person to know about my passport. My mother moved us back to Canada for two years and she was dating some guy that she wanted to go on a trip with. He’s the one who pushed for me to get the passport issued there.”
Which would work in her favor to return to her mother’s birth country.
“Were you allowed to keep your own money in your job?” he asked.
“Not all of it. I had to pay for things with Oliver, but he paid the mortgage. It was his house. Everything was in his name, but I gave him the money each month or paid the bills myself. I bought groceries.”
So the guy wasn’t completely controlling.
“It allowed you to put money away then for this.”
“Not a lot. I’ve worked one dead-end job after another. Have nothing more than a high school diploma. I didn’t like school all that much. I wanted to escape home, but once school was done, then I had to leave.”
“Had to or chose to?”
She sighed. “Chose. Would you stay if every word that came out of your mouth resulted in pain? If one day the words were fine, but the next they weren’t? I was better on the streets than at home.”
Shit. “You lived on the streets?”
“No. I moved out at eighteen. There were some girls I talked to my senior year. Some in foster care, others with similar home lives. We all had part-time jobs and thought if we pooled our money we could get a place. That’s what we did. For two years it was a revolving door of roommates.”
“Which had to be hard for someone that doesn’t trust easily.”
She snorted. “I used to lock my bedroom door. I left nothing of value in there. Desperate people do desperate things.”
