One of the first tipoffs to Katelyn that she was perhaps in an abusive marriage had been the realization that Steve made her feel intensely guilty over events, things said, things done or not done, where no guilt or shame was warranted. She—in a fact that still made her wince and want to slap her old self—had gotten so used to feeling chronically nervous and wary and guilty that she hadn’t even noticed anything awry.
After all, didn’t every wife worry that dinner might be two minutes later than whatever nebulous, random time her husband wanted to eat? Or that it might not be the type of food he was in the mood for?
Didn’t every woman not want to rock the boat or make her mate feel insecure or unloved by smiling or greeting or conversing with another man—or, heck, even responding politely to a male grocery clerk?
Didn’t every truly loving, committed female realize that her partner was only so controlling, so rigid, so intensely paranoid that she was cheating or looking to cheat, because he loved her so much and couldn’t, or wouldn’t, live without her?
It had taken a visit from Janet, a rare time where Steve had actually allowed her to stay at their house in the guest room, to open her eyes and make her see that no, not every woman accepted that kind of mental and physical tyranny as normal. When Steve finally left them to their own devices for a couple of hours because he couldn’t, as much as he wanted to, stay away from the office all week, Katelyn had almost wept, hearing Janet’s objections and her angry, shocked horror at how Katelyn was continually—casually, almost—railroaded by Steve.
It was like seeing her life and experiences through her friend’s eyes allowed her to voice, to admit, to confront, what she had always hoped—or known—deep down. It wasn’t normal. And once she acknowledged that and forced herself to do the horribly scary thing of calling his abuse what it was . . . well, she only saw it more and more. She also admitted to herself that, if anything, his behavior was growing worse over the years, not better, and if she was going to get out alive, she probably needed to do it sooner rather than later.
All this and more flashed through her mind as Steve’s glare locked on her. But old habits die hard, and familiar—if hated—feelings of shame welled up in Katelyn.
What was she doing going for runs with Brian every day when she should be focusing on the kids and what her next steps were going to be? How selfish was she? And of course it would be hard for Steve to see her and Brian together. Of course he would read something romantic into it and see it as a betrayal. He still, unrequited though it was, loved her—according to what his idea of love was, anyway. Why flirt with danger? Why make waves? Why do that to him, if she really wasn’t interested in dating? Why put him through that extra pain?
But then again, what was she “doing” to Steve? Nothing. When was she going to get over this sick, codependent weakness she had with him? Why wasn’t she strong enough to recognize the shame she felt around him was emotionally and mentally unhealthy? What kind of role model and parent would she manage to be for her kids, if she couldn’t get herself healthy and strong, once and for all?
Katelyn realized she was shaking and clutching her stomach. She forced herself to unwrap her arms from around her middle, as Callum grinned. “Looks like you two had a good run.”
He had absolutely no idea about the rage that his cheerful observation triggered in the eyes of the man standing behind him.
Katelyn’s knees trembled and she felt mildly nauseous. Then, suddenly, there was gentle pressure on her back. Brian had softly nudged her.
“So am I correct in thinking ol’ Steve won’t call me ‘buddy’ the next time we meet up alone?” His whisper was quiet to the point of being barely perceptible—but it was like the flashing beam of a lighthouse in a stormy sea. Her thoughts steadied and she found her way back to firm land.
“Yes, I think that’s a safe bet,” she said equally quietly.
Brian was here. And Callum. She was not alone with Steve. There were witnesses. She was safe. And the kids were with Aisha and Mo. They were safe.
“Yeah, it was a pretty good work out. Thanks, Callum.” To her profound relief, her tone matched his: light, friendly, normal. “Steve, it’s not your day with the kids. Why are you here?”
Steve advanced in long, angry strides. The friendly rain ceased and the sun took cover behind the clouds again.
Perhaps Callum saw something in Katelyn’s face or felt a change in the air at Steve’s movement, but for whatever reason, he pivoted toward Steve.
Steve’s voice was low and furious. “Maybe I had a father’s intuition. Maybe I felt my wife wasn’t watching our precious children properly on ‘her’ days.”
Callum’s eyes narrowed in surprise, but it was Brian who spoke. “Whoa, that’s enough. As you told me when we first met, Katelyn here is your ex-wife.”
“What does that matter? I have a right to know my children are being cared for. That their mother’s not out”—he practically spat the words—“cavorting with anything with two legs and a dick.”
Because of his mellow temperament and gentle demeanor, Katelyn sometimes forgot how big Callum was, but as he blocked Steve from moving any closer with a restraining hand, Steve seemed well aware of it. And then Brian stepped toward him too.
Steve reconsidered his audience and lifted his hands apologetically. “Sorry, Brian—Callum,” he said. “I didn’t mean that how it sounded. It’s just, well, this break up has been really hard on me. I love my wife, I mean, Katelyn, and our kids. I’d do anything for them.”
Callum snorted and Brian outright laughed. “Anything except respect her wishes, or let her go, right, buddy?”
Steve tried once more. “I don’t know what she’s told you. I wasn’t perfect in the past, but—”
“I think you should head out, Steve,” Callum said. “You’re more than welcome when it’s your day to pick up your kids, but other than that, well, this is private property and I have a business to run.” He sounded calm, but Katelyn was sure his words were a warning—and not just to Steve. Her flesh burned. Callum and Jo did have a business to run. She couldn’t bear it if her stupid family drama caused hassles for them or hurt their professionalism in front of their other guests. Yes, because she didn’t have any place else to go at the moment, but also because they’d been kind to her and she didn’t want them to suffer for it.
“Please, Steve. Just go. I don’t want to get into this again, or to get anyone else involved. I’ll see you Friday at five.”
Steve’s eyes glinted and his fists clenched. “When we go to court this time, you’ll be sorry.”
All Katelyn could do was nod wearily. “I’m already sorry, Steve. That never changes.”
He blasted her with another look, opened his mouth, then closed it with a sneer, and stormed back to his truck.
He roared away, spinning his tires and tearing up the carefully raked gravel. It was like a physical symbol of the embarrassment spraying through her: ugly and obvious, destructive and intensely stupid. That he’d shown his true colors to Brian and Callum was little comfort. Sometimes he could keep up a façade indefinitely; other times, like today, he had virtually no control. Either way, she was left with a throbbing, near tears awareness: because of her, River’s Sigh B & B’s peace had been disturbed and would be further threatened if she stayed. She could practically hear that thought run through Callum’s head—so loud, in fact, that when he spoke, she shook her head and stared for a long minute before grasping what he was actually saying.
“I’m sorry, Katelyn. I should’ve stuck with the simple truth that you weren’t around, but I didn’t pick up any off cues from him when he asked me to track you down. Won’t happen again.”
“What? No. You don’t have to apologize to me. I need to apologize to you. I’m so sorry.”
Callum’s face was sad. “You have nothing to be sorry for.” He punched Brian’s arm lightly. “Well, that pump won’t fix itself. I’ll see you later.”
It was only as he walked off that Katelyn noticed the small toolbox he was carrying. She was left standing awkwardly beside Brian, all traces of the peace she had enjoyed on the trails totally obliterated.
“I’m really—”
Brian interrupted her before she could apologize yet again by taking her hand. Unlike when their fingers had connected during the first movie night, there was nothing remotely sexual or electric in the touch this time. It was just the solid grip of a friend, soothing and grounding.
“So how did that happen anyway?” Brian asked after they’d crossed the clearing and started on the trail leading to Spring cabin.
“What do you mean?”
He jerked his head toward the parking lot as if Steve was still parked there. “How did you two . . . come to be?”
She sighed heavily and dropped his hand. “It’s an old boring story. You know, stupid naïve girl marries a charming monster. Ever heard it?”
Brian laughed, but it was a bitter sound. “More times than you’d ever believe. Relationships. They’re for idiots, aren’t they?”
Katelyn kept silent because after what he’d just seen and her own admission of naiveté, she couldn’t say she hoped not. But she did hope not. Surely, good relationships, good marriages, existed for some people. Look at Janet. Look at her own parents. Their union hadn’t been perfect, but it also hadn’t been awful. She knew it would be a long, long time before she was free and safe to try again, but she did hope she got a chance sometime.
“Do you mind my asking—” Brian faltered.
“Mind your asking what?”
“Why did you stay with him as long as you did, long enough to have two kids with him?”
Yep, that was the question, wasn’t it? The big one. The one she’d asked herself daily for a long time. The one she still didn’t have a completely satisfactory answer to.
Brian misunderstood her lack of an immediate response. “I’m sorry.” He shook his head. “That’s incredibly personal. Forgive me.”
Katelyn stretched her arms out in front of her and cracked her knuckles. “No apology or forgiveness needed. At all. It’s not like you haven’t shared some inner secrets of your own. It just doesn’t have an easy answer—or if it does I haven’t discovered what it is yet.”
“That makes sense. I read somewhere that there’s always some sort of psychological pay off for what we do, decisions we make or things we put up with.”
Katelyn shot him a disbelieving look.
Brian held up his hands apologetically. “I’m an ass. I was thinking out loud.”
“No, not all,” Katelyn said for a second time. “I’m just surprised. I read something similar once. It was really eye-opening for me.” She took a minute to process her thoughts, and Brian walked quietly by her side.
“I think it’s hard because that idea, that there’s some overarching ‘pay off’ that explains why a person stays with an abuser, suggests if we can figure out what it is, presto, everything will be magically fixed. It tries to make something that’s incredibly complex simple.”
Brian nodded.
“And then other times, I think maybe the answer is simple, that I only want it to be complex because it would help assuage my guilt.”
Brian’s mouth opened, no doubt to share some platitude about how survivors shouldn’t feel guilt—but she didn’t need or want to hear that right now. She shook her head, and he held back whatever he’d been about to say. She knew full well she wasn’t culpable for the abuse, but she still felt she’d been complicit in some ways—and dealing with the elements of her personality that opened her up to abuse, allowed her to put up with it for so long, was her way of making sure she’d never be in that situation again.
“But then, by thinking that, I realize again, no, it really is complicated.”
Brian looked confused—and she totally related.
“I don’t know what I got out of the relationship,” she said, frustrated. “At first, of course, like most people erroneously think—and not just about abusers, but about anything they find unpalatable in their partner—I thought I could change him, that my love was strong enough to be a cure-all. And he’d say that too—that I was a ‘rock.’ That I would be his ‘salvation.’ That he didn’t know what he’d do without me. That he didn’t deserve me.”
She took a deep breath. “Also, I had very elderly parents. My mom was forty-four when she had me and my dad was fifty-six. They were very traditional. He was the breadwinner and head of the house. His word was law and she, in every way, supported those notions. The difference was that my father was a very kind man, not a tyrant in any way, and though, yes, he was a chauvinist, he was the kind who thought that meant you needed to dote on, take care of, cherish the ‘fairer’ sex. Steve gave mouth service to similar ideas and I’d been too sheltered to not know the difference between chivalry and sexism.”
Brian seemed a little shell-shocked.
“T.M.I?” Katelyn asked.
He looked blank.
“Too much information?”
He shook his head. “Not at all. Please go on, if you want to, anyway.”
Katelyn sighed heavily. “My parents died in a car accident just after I graduated. I was vulnerable, lonely. Steve was there, protective and strong, wanting to take care of me—and in the beginning of our marriage, incidences were few and far enough between that I’d think, hey . . . it’s working. I’m doing it. I’m fixing him.” She stopped talking and shot Brian another look, but he still didn’t appear shocked or disappointed in her. His expression was merely . . . compassionate.
“And also, he would be so sad, so seemingly genuine in his regret—and so flamboyant and passionate and over the top in the ways he’d try to make up for his ‘failings’ that I felt . . . ” she broke off, feeling nauseous, “loved, like it was the price you pay for a huge, deep, passionate all-consuming love—that you get a little consumed.”
A small choking sound escaped Katelyn before she could swallow it. She was shocked by the intensity of the shame, sadness, guilt and hopelessness that talking about this still triggered.
“It was hideously hard on me when I realized that the extreme highs and lows of our relationship were pretty much a cliché of every battering situation.”
“Rough,” Brian said. His voice held no judgment and no further questions, only commiseration.
“Most of all though, I just didn’t recognize it for what it was. It took me a long time to realize that the elements of our relationship that were making me so crazy and sad were abuse. No one wants to think they’re a victim—or can even see abuse as abuse, at first. Or I didn’t and couldn’t anyway.”
They were almost at Spring cabin. Lacey’s flutelike voice carried over to them, chatting about something to do with the swing set, though she was out of sight, around the corner of the building.
Brian’s pace slowed. “Thank you for sharing all that. I’m honored you trust me with it.”
Katelyn rolled her neck. “Oh, yeah, lucky you.”
Brian’s eyes creased and his voice was soft. “I do feel lucky.”
She looked at him for a long moment. Then nodded. “Well, thank you.”
Brian clapped his hands, then rubbed them together briskly, and Katelyn could see him mentally changing gears, getting ready to be back in Aisha and the kids’ company again.
“So,” he said, “you’re going to write down what happened with Steve back there and send the details to Marilee, right?”
“Um, I hadn’t thought about it yet.”
“You should. Every run-in you have with him, no matter how small it seems, should be on the record. He wasn’t happy today. Not at all. And if he thinks you and I have any sort of thing going on, it may finally hit home that you guys are really over.”
Brian didn’t have to finish his thought; Katelyn did it for him. “And he might stop holding back in the hopes he can lure me back. He might lose it once and for all.”
Brian’s expression was grim. “Yeah, you know the drill, hey?”
Katelyn’s stomach dropped and she laughed inappropriately. “Right near the top of the chart for causes of death in women, right? Heart disease, cancer, husbands.”
“It’s not funny.”
Katelyn bit her lip. Nodded. “I know. And I don’t actually even believe that. I just don’t know what else to do sometimes, you know? I have to laugh or I’ll—” She stopped talking, didn’t bother to fill in the blank with go crazy, start crying and never stop, become homicidal—all of which felt terrifyingly true from time to time. She cupped her palm over her left eye, a bizarrely simple but effective technique that staved off tears.
Brian stopped at the staircase to Spring’s porch, patted her shoulder in a silent farewell, and left.
Before he walked five paces, however, he turned back. Katelyn tilted her head questioningly. She hadn’t moved yet, had needed a moment or two to compose herself and transition from prey to protector and mom. Lacey and Sawyer had been part of too many awful scenes. Since they hadn’t witnessed this one, she wanted to spare them its emotional fall out.
“What?” she asked finally, when he still hadn’t spoken.
“I, well . . . ” Brian pounded his fist lightly into his palm. “Ah, shit, I’ll just say it. I’d thought a casual friendship might be nice for both of us, but I should’ve known it would be misread. I don’t want to complicate things for you with your psycho ex, so maybe we should cool the running thing for a bit, you think?”
No, she didn’t think that. Not at all.
Brian watched her, sad and patient, and she realized she’d only responded in her head. “No!” The word came out too loud. Katelyn darted a look toward her unseen children, but there was no break in the burble of conversation coming from the yard, and no small people came running. Katelyn closed the distance between her and Brian in rapid steps.
“Don’t,” she said. “Please. I mean, I totally understand if it’s too much for you. I’m a friend with a lot of baggage, I get it. But this is what he does. Waltzes in wherever and whenever I make a new friend or I’m just starting to get a life of my own again and does his crazy thing and totally wrecks it for me. Scares people away. I’ve even lost jobs because of him. He wants me isolated, alone and dependent. That’s all he has ever wanted.”
She took a gulping breath. “I can—and I will—keep running on my own, but . . . I don’t want to.”
There was a moment of silence as deep and all-encompassing as the quiet of the woods and sky around them.
Then Katelyn reached out and placed her hand on Brian’s forearm. Somehow this contact felt bigger than their casual handholding earlier—and maybe he felt similarly, because he flinched. But his flesh was warm and strong under her palm and she stayed her course. After a moment, he covered her hand with his, and Katelyn realized that her fingers had been freezing, but she hadn’t noticed until she felt his heat.
“Okay,” he said. “But I don’t want to cause problems for you, you know?”
She nodded. “I do know that. And I appreciate it—but you don’t cause problems for me. He does. Also, no one gets to dictate what I do anymore. Not him out of selfishness. Not you out of selflessness.”
Brian’s gaze rested on her, intense but comforting at the same time. Then he laughed. “You’re something else.”
The heaviness of the moment lightened, and relief or something like joy coursed through her. He was going to continue running with her. She couldn’t keep from beaming. “Don’t think compliments today will keep me from kicking your butt tomorrow.”
“I’m not that big an idiot,” he assured her with mock solemnity. Then he grinned and loped off. At the bend in the trail that would steal him from view, he turned and looked her way again. Somehow she’d known he would. She waved. He smiled, shook his head, and disappeared.
Katelyn inhaled deeply, then headed around the corner of the cabin to rescue Aisha and to listen to her kids’ stories about their morning adventures.