Saint fretted her way through dinner, fielded a call from Mrs. Meyer, who’d seen the Leavesham boy in the Monta Clare Drugstore and surmised he was purchasing either condoms or some kind of sedative to make her granddaughter more pliable. Saint had hung up the phone, gone back to fretting and fighting the urge to call round to the Leavesham house and draw her gun on the diabetic mother.
At nine she paced.
At ten she made calls, and at eleven she found the Leaveshams’ address, where at the window she saw Charlotte and Matt making out in the den. She hammered the door and pinned Matt to the florid wallpaper in their neat hallway with her forearm.
Saint caught up with Charlotte at the end of Cotterham Avenue and reached for her arm.
“Don’t you fucking touch me,” Charlotte said, her cheeks burning.
Saint took a step back, her face just as flushed. “You broke curfew.”
Charlotte glared. “You’re not my mother.”
“And I thank God for that every day.” Saint spoke the words before she realized, before she knew they would later strangle her with shame.
There was a moment when Charlotte took the full force of that blow, winded till she reared.
“I suppose if you were my mother I wouldn’t even be here,” Charlotte said.
Saint took a step back. “I don’t know—”
“That’s what you do when you get pregnant, right?”
Saint shook her head.
Charlotte went on, told Saint truths she already knew, how the girl was ashamed to live with her, to be seen with her. “You keep that trunk in your closet. You collect leaves and pine cones. You sit home with your grandmother. You have no life, so you fuck around with mine. You couldn’t even keep your husband. You—”
Saint felt it build, felt the conversation with her grandmother from earlier that evening. Saint felt the way the girl looked at her, the way everyone in Monta Clare looked at her. And she could not stop the words before they spilled from her. “He beat me.”
Charlotte stopped.
And the two faced each other in the street.
Saint closed her eyes to the moon and the stars. “I was pregnant and Jimmy…he beat me. He fractured my eye socket. And my jaw…it still clicks when I eat.”
This time Charlotte shook her head, the words too much.
“I saw a dentist because one of my teeth stayed loose.”
The street died around them. The town and the woodland and sky. And what had once seemed so beautiful and safe was lost.
“My grandmother said hatred is misplaced fear. And maybe she’s right, because when I lie down to sleep each night, I still feel scared that he’ll come do it again. No matter that I’m a cop. That I carry a gun. I’m scared—”
She stopped then because she saw the look on Charlotte’s face.
And then Charlotte turned and ran.