Chelsea runs down the grimy hallway in her VFR-branded robe, heart pounding harder than it did in the ring.
Her baby is coming. Her daughter.
Ella.
She shoves out the big metal door into the humid twilight fug of the parking lot beyond, the asphalt lit by sick orange streetlights, and much to her surprise a small crowd of people is standing there in the dark. A few heads turn, someone starts whispering, and it only takes a moment before they all focus on her like sharks smelling blood. They screech and wave and hold up signs, screaming, “Florida Woman, oh my God, it’s Florida Woman! I love you!” They surge toward her, but the security guys hold them back, and still hands press out toward her like she’s a guru who can offer blessings. She gives the crowd a single, frowning up-nod, trying to stay in Florida Woman character until she’s past, then jogs for the tour bus. It’s chugging in place, right where she left it earlier today. She stops in front of the door, her heart going a mile a minute, the makeup melting off her face, her lungs bursting.
The tour bus door swings open, but Indigo isn’t sitting in the driver’s seat. Chelsea turns her head to the left to ask what’s up, and that’s when she sees him.
David.
It’s like seeing a ghost, some hideous monster from her nightmares, and she’s stepping back outside in slow motion, the world running slow as honey when she hears a familiar voice from inside the bus cry, “Mommy!”
Ah. Shit.
He has Brooklyn.
She freezes.
“Come on in,” David says, looming over her as she stands on the bottom step, a wall of heat and groupie energy behind her. “The water’s fine.” His smile is a slow, cold thing, an alligator crawling up from the blackened depths. When she doesn’t step up fast enough, he raises his eyebrows and shows her the evil black gun in his hand.
She steps fully onto the tour bus that has become her safety, her sanctuary, her healing space, and he jerks the lever that closes the door behind her and locks it. The sound of the crowd goes utterly silent; that’s the beauty of a tour bus. It blocks all sound.
Well, most sound.
She’s pretty sure that if he shoots his gun, someone will hear it. But considering the close quarters, by then it would be too late.
“Mommy?”
Her inner lioness kicks in, overriding her current fear, and she pushes past David in the narrow aisle, past all the bunks to the sofas in the communal area in the back where…
Dear God.
It’s not just Brooklyn.
It’s Ella and Patricia, too.
All of them, here at once.
What the hell has David done?
It doesn’t matter. She and Brooklyn tackle-hug each other, and she digs her nose into her daughter’s hair and inhales that sweet perfume every mother knows, her baby’s head, her entire body flooding with a heady mix of love and terror and whatever makes a cat’s claws come out. Brooklyn smells like someone else’s shampoo and has a new star-shaped scar on her forehead that Chelsea wants to ask about.
“Mom?”
Her head jerks around, and there’s Ella, biting her lip, looking like one of Peter Pan’s Lost Boys. Chelsea holds her arm out, and after the briefest of teenage pauses Ella launches herself to join them in a tight, perfect, wonderful hug. Chelsea sneaks a sniff of her head, too, smells more unfamiliar shampoo and a sort of world-weary stench. Ella has been through something Brooklyn hasn’t, Chelsea can feel it on a gut level, her Mom senses tingling.
Much to her surprise, Patricia stands and hobbles over—is she hurt? What’s wrong with her? Why is her skin so hot?—and inserts herself awkwardly into a hug that was very natural before she showed up and is now uncomfortable and stilted. Chelsea wishes she could freeze and rewind this moment, just put her arms around her daughters and feel that burst of genuine love and relief again, but now here’s her goddamn asshole mother forcing herself into a moment that’s not hers, as always, and Chelsea wants to tell her to fuck off, but…
“Just survive, little bunny,” her mother whispers, and she sounds dazed and sad and absolutely nothing like herself at all.
Chelsea looks up from the hug, over her daughters’ perfect, sleek blond heads, and there’s David, watching them, gun in hand, disgusted and full of hate, blocking the only way out.
“Are you done?” he says, sneering.
“Go sit down,” she whispers to her girls. “Far back. Ella?”
Ella meets her eyes and nods, and there’s a new and terrifying understanding there. Whatever her eldest daughter has been through in the weeks since Chelsea left has not been good. She’s too thin, skittish as a wild animal. Ella puts an arm around Brooklyn and pulls her to the couch all the way in the back, the one right by the toilet.
“But why—” Brooklyn starts.
David points the gun at them—at the girls.
“Sit the fuck down and shut up, for once!” he growls.
Ella pulls her little sister into her lap and murmurs, “Shh, Brookie. It’ll be okay.”
Patricia, left standing alone, hobbles back to the nearest sofa and collapses onto it, slumping a little. She’s not well, but it’s clearly not a Violence thing, nor could it possibly be a Covid thing. But that’s a problem for another day—if there is another day.
Now only Chelsea and David are standing. She’s in her costume still, the heavy black mascara framing her view, her robe coming undone. At least she’s wearing a T-shirt today, not the skimpy tank top that shows deep cleavage. David is wearing a Florida Woman–branded shirt that hangs too low, her own face staring back at her. He’s lost a little weight and a lot of muscle, but that doesn’t lessen the threat he presents—he’s holding a gun, after all. An older version of Chelsea would cower, would kowtow, would ask him if he’s okay, ask him what he needs. An older version of Chelsea would pretend to care.
But that version of Chelsea is gone.
“What do you want?” she asks, her voice flat.
He snorts and shakes his head like she’s a little kid who keeps writing her E’s backward.
“What do I want? Are you shitting me? I want to reverse three months and forget what it’s like to shit in a public toilet surrounded by criminals after eating expired government food. I want a wife who didn’t betray me and destroy our life, destroy our family.”
So melodramatic.
And of course, it’s all about him.
“I can’t change any of that, David. I’m asking what you want right now. What will it take for you to leave us alone?”
David’s eyes bug out of his head. “Leave you alone?” he splutters. He advances, taller, looming, the gun held down at her head at an angle from bad 1990s gang movies. “Bitch, I don’t want to leave you alone. I want you to fucking apologize!”
She glances back at the girls to remind him to watch his language. Brooklyn is in Ella’s lap, her eyes as big as the Disney princess she thinks she is. When Chelsea glances outside the bus’s heavily tinted windows, she doesn’t see anything comforting or helpful, no one approaching. Even the security guard is out of sight. And Indigo isn’t in the front seat.
“Looking for help? Too fuckin’ bad,” he says. “The driver’s locked in the bathroom without her phone.” When he smiles…
God, it makes Chelsea shiver.
To think that this…thing…was inside David all along, and she invited him into her life. It was bad enough as she learned, bit by bit, everything she’d given up for him, but she never thought that underneath all his demands, his gaslighting, his cruelty, he was this monstrous. She thought maybe he was just callous, self-absorbed, distracted. Emotionally disconnected at best, narcissistic at worst.
Now she’s learning he’s a stone-cold psychopath.
That changes things.
She can’t lean into tears, into pleading, into anything emotional.
Because any man who threatens his own children with a loaded gun can’t be reasoned with.
Her mind shifts, slides sideways like she’s an animal caught in a pen and working her way out. She refocuses on David.
“Now,” he says, bellying up to some sort of evil-villain speech that he probably sees as a hero’s monologue. “I’m going to put this away so we can just talk.” The way he says just talk suggests that Chelsea will do no talking other than saying yes, David or I’m sorry, David when appropriate. He holds up the gun with a smug, idiot grin before placing it on the counter he’s leaning against, in a place none of the women could reach. “The way I see it—” he begins.
But Chelsea has heard enough.
She lunges.