There came a time when you had to make a choice.
This was one of them.
“I’m going to have to do something.”
Glenna Carnes stared at the four women surrounding her as the words seared themselves into her soul. She couldn’t keep doing this to her daughters.
All Glenna wanted was for her daughters to feel safe. This was just proof that she was failing miserably at that task.
Emmaline was still crying. Emmy—her tough one. Her middle child who had never been afraid of anything before. Today she had been terrified by a delivery man.
Glenna scooped her up and rocked her, meeting the eyes of her two closest friends, and the two other women at W4HAV, the women’s charity where she worked as a trauma counselor. They all knew this couldn’t keep going on. This fear was destroying her baby girls. “I…this is getting out of hand. I can’t seem to avoid them anywhere. I have to do something.”
The delivery man hadn’t been one of her former brothers-in-law, but Emmy hadn’t known that. All her almost five-year-old daughter remembered about the uncle who had shown up in the front yard four months ago screaming that Glenna owed them something was that he had been dressed in a private-delivery-company uniform. That had been enough to have her little girl screaming today. Between that and the way her seven-year-old Evangeline flinched each time the telephone rang and her two-and-a-half-year-old baby Eleanor cried and resisted whenever Glenna tried to leave her in the co-op nursery room now…
The girls weren’t getting over their fears—they were just getting worse.
She had to do something.
Glenna looked at Robin and Rory, her two closest friends on the planet. Her sisters of the heart. Rory had scooped Elly into her own arms and was rocking her, too.
Her most empathetic baby always cried when one of her sisters was upset.
Evey watched from the doorway to the children’s playroom at W4HAV, a leery look on her beautiful face. One filled with suspicion. Fear. Worry that no child her age should have.
It was the last straw.
Her ex’s family wasn’t anywhere near them now—not that she knew, anyway, but she wouldn’t put it past them—but their constant harassment of her was destroying her daughters’ sense of safety and peace.
She wouldn’t have it. Not any longer.
She’d do anything for her daughters.
She looked at the women surrounding her. She knew how the charity operated—knew what it was capable of. And Lacy, the blond woman next to her, had been trying to talk her into asking for help for weeks. “I need to find a place to get away for a while. Build a new life for the four of us. Where they don’t have to be afraid of their father’s family any longer.”
It wasn’t running, exactly. It was relocating. Doing what was best for her daughters.
Even though it meant leaving everything, everyone, she knew behind.
“I have to do this. Before I change my mind.”
“Where are you going to go?” Robin asked, tears filling her big blue eyes. Tears—and understanding. Robin and Rory knew her struggles, knew exactly what battle she had been fighting for just too long…
Robin’s own two-year-old daughter was in the playroom with Robin’s nine-year-old twin boys. Innocent children, too.
Children who had experienced far too much pain already.
All Glenna wanted was for them to grow up in a world without this kind of fear and hurt and loss. If she could keep that from touching her girls, she would do whatever it took.
“I…I don’t know. I just know I have to get them away from here for a while. So that they can learn not to be afraid.” Her heart broke for her daughters. She’d tried everything from confronting her ex’s family to speaking with an attorney about restraining orders against all of them.
She’d filed a report with Detective Acardi, a friend of Rory’s, after the latest incident.
He had told her the Texas State Police could make a case for attempted kidnapping, but her ex-mother-in-law would probably plead it down to maintaining a common nuisance or something trivial like that.
Never mind that Elly had had dreams of the scary lady trying to take her away every night since. Nothing Glenna did could fix that.
“I have a brother, but…he lives on a military base. I don’t want to impose on him.” Her half brother would let them stay with him for a while, but it would be awkward for them all. They weren’t exactly close.
“Let W4HAV find you a place,” Lacy said for about the fifteenth time in a week. “It’s what we do.”
“I know.” She didn’t want to need that kind of help. There were women out there who needed the escape the women’s charity provided far more than Glenna did. Abused women who needed to get away however they could. Abused men, too, who came to W4HAV for help, though far fewer men would admit they needed the help than women.
Glenna was a respected mental health counselor; she led four different counseling groups for the charity at two o’clock, four days each week. She worked the intake desk four nights a week from three thirty p.m. until nine, when she took the girls home and put them to bed. She had a small home she had purchased on Boethe Street after she’d paid off half of her student debt, and then she’d paid that house and her remaining debt off with the life insurance policy she’d still had on her ex at the time of his death over two years ago.
She had a good job, her bills were paid, there was a roof over their heads, and her children were safe. They should have been just fine.
But they weren’t.
Her ex’s family could get to them at any time.
His mother walking into the church multipurpose room where the homeschool co-op met each week and nearly walking out with Elly had just proven that.
There had been a homeschool dad Glenna had known well in the parking lot who had seen what was happening—and stopped it. Just in time. She had been lucky he had recognized Elly that day and stepped in to make a difference. Had questioned.
Glenna hadn’t slept well since.
Her arms tightened around Emmy. Her bright, fiery, passionate, brave little girl who would challenge the world just because she could.
Crying because of a package left on the desk at W4HAV.
Glenna understood how trauma worked, though she didn’t work with children in her groups. She wasn’t going to see the trauma of their father’s death get compounded with her own children because of his family.
That was one thing he had been adamant about when she’d filed for divorce—he hadn’t wanted his mother or three brothers anywhere near the girls. No matter what. That had been something he and Glenna had actually agreed on.
Lincoln’s mother didn’t believe that. And she was determined to get to the girls, no matter what.
“I need someplace to go. Even if it means I’m washing dishes for a living for a while. I need to get out of Finley Creek. Before they destroy my daughters even more.”
Lacy asked for her to give her a day or two to work things out. To find some options that would suit Glenna and the girls.
Glenna knew how it worked. There was a fund that no one talked about.
The escape fund.
It was designed to help those victims of violence who had no real recourse but to run.
Glenna wasn’t like that.
The same procedures in place for that, would help her now.
She looked at her children one more time. Yes. She would do whatever she had to for her girls. Anything.
Even if it meant leaving everything behind.