Chapter 2 - THE STORY HE HAD ALREADY TOLD ABOUT ME
Claire did not get to play the rest.
Grant tore the phone from her hand and threw it across the patio.
It struck the grass instead of concrete.
The recording kept playing.
His own voice continued faintly from somewhere near the hydrangeas.
Claire stepped between us.
“What the hell is happening?”
Grant pointed at me as though I were the person who needed explaining.
“She’s leaving.”
Claire stared at him.
“So?”
“With my kid.”
My stomach tightened.
I pressed one hand over it.
Still no movement.
Claire saw the gesture.
“Elena?”
“I need to get out.”
Grant laughed.
“She put herself in there.”
Claire looked at the mud packed around my hips.
Then at the shovel beside Grant’s boots.
Then at his hands.
“Did you bury her?”
“She climbed in.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
Grant’s face hardened.
Claire had always been the only person in his family who could speak to him that way.
Maybe that was why he had spent the last six months making sure she distrusted me.
It had started subtly.
At Sunday dinner, Grant would say, “Elena’s been having another rough week.”
When I asked what he meant, he would smile.
“You know. Hormones.”
If I disagreed, his mother, Marlene, would touch my hand and tell me pregnancy could make women feel unlike themselves.
Grant began offering examples.
I had forgotten to turn off the stove.
I had cried because he came home late.
I had accused him of checking my phone.
I had refused to attend his cousin’s graduation barbecue.
All technically true.
None complete.
The stove had been on low beneath a pot of soup while I carried laundry upstairs.
I cried because Grant disappeared until two in the morning and refused to answer.
He had checked my phone.
I skipped the barbecue because the previous night he had shoved a kitchen chair against the bedroom door and told me to “sleep off the drama.”
But Grant never supplied those details.
By July, people started watching me before they answered me.
Especially Claire.
“I’m calling 911,” she said now.
Grant grabbed her phone.
“No.”
Claire jerked it away.
“Don’t touch me.”
“I said we’re handling this.”
“We?”
Grant looked at me.
Then back at his sister.
“She has been threatening to disappear with the baby for months.”
“I said I wanted space.”
“You said Kentucky.”
“My sister lives in Kentucky.”
“There.”
He spread his hands.
“Listen to her.”
Claire’s expression flickered.
It was tiny.
But I saw it.
Recognition.
Grant had told her this story before.
I grabbed the muddy edge of the trench and pulled.
My freed knee came onto the grass.
Pain shot through my lower back.
The baby moved.
One hard roll beneath my ribs.
I nearly cried from relief.
Claire reached for me.
Grant stepped in front of her.
“Don’t encourage this.”
Claire stared at him.
“She’s eight months pregnant and stuck in mud.”
“She did this to make me look dangerous.”
I stopped moving.
There it was again.
Not concern about what he had done.
Concern about how it would look.
Claire’s gaze shifted toward the phone lying near the flowers.
Grant followed her eyes.
He kicked it under a patio chair.
Then he said something I didn’t understand.
“If she gets that recording, everything you signed becomes worthless.”
Claire went completely still.
I looked at her.
“What did you sign?”
She didn’t answer.
May you like
Grant realized too late what he had revealed.
And suddenly the woman who had come to help me escape looked almost as frightened as I was.
