Never Let You Go(12)

“You didn’t mention it was at a bar, Lindsey. You’re about to be a mother.”

“I wasn’t drinking. I don’t understand why you’re so angry.”

“Peter’s wife used to go to the pub too.” He was holding my gaze steady. “You remember what happened to her.” Peter was one of his workers. One I didn’t particularly like. I usually avoided him when I came to the job site. He’d caught his wife cheating and divorced her, got the kids and the house. I couldn’t believe Andrew didn’t trust me. How could he threaten me like this?

“I would never cheat on you, Andrew.”

“You better not.” He took a long swallow of his beer, still holding eye contact.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you don’t get rides with other men.”

My pulse was racing. I’d seen Andrew get frustrated, seen him come home in bad moods where he went into his office for hours or sat and stared at the TV, but he’d never been cruel or vindictive. I felt as though a stranger had walked into our house.

“Maybe I should stay at my parents’s tonight.”

“You’re not going anywhere. The roads are bad.”

The baby was shifting and rolling. I imagined my heartbeat, how loud it must be. Stress was bad. I had to stay calm. I curved my hand over my belly. Shush, little baby. Shush.

Andrew’s gaze was focused on my stomach. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Lindsey. You need to be more careful. I don’t want anything to happen to the baby, understand?”

No. That wasn’t what he was saying at all. I saw it in his face. The warning. He wasn’t just threatening that he might divorce me. This was a threat of something far more serious. Something I couldn’t even fathom, but it was thick and dark and dangerous.

“I understand.”

He drained his beer, grabbed another from the fridge. “Then I guess we don’t have anything to worry about, do we?” He walked into the living room and collapsed onto the couch, reached for the remote. I didn’t know if we were done talking, and I was scared to move. I slowly walked to the doorway and waited for a moment, but he was staring at the TV. I watched as he brought the beer to his mouth, his throat muscles flexing as he gulped it. Could it be the booze? Some men got really mean when they drank. Andrew would never normally say these things.

The stew was bubbling on the stove behind me in the kitchen. Food. I needed to get him to eat. My mom always told my dad not to drink on an empty stomach.

When I came back into the living room, Andrew didn’t look up. I placed the bowl on the coffee table in front of him. He was watching a hockey game, their red uniforms reflecting in his eyes. I slowly sat on the couch, my breath tight in my chest. His hand suddenly reached out and I flinched, but he just rested it on my stomach. His palm was hot.

“We should get a security system in the house,” he said. “Been a lot of break-ins lately. We can hook it up so I can check the cameras in my office at the site.”

I stared at his profile, thought about cameras watching me all day, following me around. His hand pressed harder against my stomach, and I winced at the sudden pressure.

“Okay,” I said. “If that’s what you want.”





CHAPTER SIX


DECEMBER 2016



When I get home Sophie is sprawled on the living room floor drawing. As a child, she was obsessed with painting and would stand in front of the easel Andrew made for her, chubby cheeks smeared with paint, hands gripping a paintbrush she splashed against the paper in bold purple streaks. “Look, Mommy! It’s you!”

Since she started high school her chosen medium is ink. She can work on one sketch for weeks, her face grimly determined or full of blissful contentment. I find her doodles on the papers by the phone, on our mail, the newspaper, magazine pages. I started tucking them away into a box. Sometimes I take them out and study the lines, the curves of each pen stroke. I love this glimpse into her mind, her imagination. A world where fairies can morph into trees and fish into birds and boxes become flowers and wings and gnomes and dragons.

Sometimes I worry about what I see: a skull with a broken heart, a tire with flames, devil’s horns, sad clown faces, rivers of tears. When I ask her what they mean, she shrugs.

“I don’t think about it. They come out of my fingers that way.”

Everything about Sophie is expressive, her words, her face, the way she moves her hands when she’s talking. She looks more like Andrew than me, but her style is all her own. She wears tunics, patterned leggings and scarves, colors her hair pink and blue and turquoise. This week it’s violet, makes her green eyes huge. She has my shape. Small, but we’re strong. We run fast.

When I told her Andrew was out of prison, she went silent, then said, “So? He told his lawyer he was going to leave us alone, right?” His lawyer called my lawyer after the divorce went through: Andrew wishes Lindsey well and won’t bother her anymore. He also sent a large check for Sophie’s support. I never used any of it and put it in a savings account for her.

“We still need to be extra-careful from now on,” I said.

“We don’t matter to him anymore,” she insisted.

“You matter to me. So be careful, okay? Tell me if you see him.”