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I CLASPED THE CUP OF coffee in my hands as the four women sat around me—Madison, Jane, Julia, and Iris. I couldn’t believe we were all here. Hell, I couldn’t believe that I’d managed to convince all of them to come and entertain the thought of talking to me about what had happened between them and Tony. I’d put a post on some local social media, trying to reach out to any women who might have dealt with Tony – and, to my surprise, a handful of them had responded, and agreed to come meet us to talk about this.
“How did you meet him?” Julia asked nobody in particular, glancing down at her coffee cup as though she wanted to dive head-first into it.
“I don’t even really remember,” Jane replied, shaking her head. “He was just...there in my life one day, and I didn’t know how I was supposed to get rid of him.”
“That’s exactly it,” Iris agreed. “He just made himself indispensable to me. He made it so I was totally reliant on him, so there was nothing I could do without him knowing about it.”
She shivered at the memory, and I reached over to give her shoulder a squeeze. I understood it. We all did. We all knew what it had been like to be with a man like that, how terrifying it had felt to realize how much danger we were in, how quickly we had given up control to him.
“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” Julia remarked. Her voice was tiny, and I wished there was more that I could do to comfort her. I knew exactly how she felt, how it had been for me in the first few months since I ran away from my home to get away from him. It was how I had felt, really, up until I’d met Warren—until I’d met someone who seemed able to look past everything that had happened to me, and see the person underneath. The person I had been before Tony had gotten his claws into me.
“It’s the right thing to do,” Jane assured her. “We can’t let him keep getting away with this. Think about how many more women he’s going to hurt if we don’t all come together and get in his way. It’s the most important thing we can do for each other.”
I nodded in agreement. I was still struggling to know just what to say to these women. I wished I had something more useful than silence, but I figured it was important for them to get their stories and emotions out. It was the only way they were going to be able to move on, and besides, I wanted to hear them.
Sitting there, in Madison’s living room, with the watery morning light pouring through the window, they talked. Jane, Julia, and Iris told us what had happened to them. Though there were differences between the stories, small details that didn’t exactly match, it was clear enough that there was a pattern here. He had a cycle, of finding women who he wanted, and then breaking them down systematically until they were totally under his control.
I inhaled a deep, shaky breath in the silence that followed them telling us their stories. Other people had been through it, too? I might have known that intellectually, but I had never actually—I had never, in a million years, considered that other people really felt the shame and guilt that I did. But I could hear it in their voices, even when they weren’t coming right out and saying it. I could feel it.
And it made me even more determined to do what I could to bring this guy down.
“I’m so sorry,” I offered finally. It wasn’t much, but it was the least I could do, knowing what had happened to them. “I’m so sorry you had to go through any of that. If I could go back in time, if I could do what I could to warn you of the kind of man he was and protect you from him...”
I choked up, shaking my head. Madison frowned at me and put an arm around my shoulder.
“You know we don’t blame you for any of that,” she promised me. “You can’t let that sit on your shoulders. This is about him, not about you. He’s the one who hurt us.”
I looked up at her, my eyes prickling with tears, and tried to pull myself together. She was right, and the sooner I could get that through my head, the better.
“Thank you,” I replied, gulping down a big breath of air to try and ground myself again. “I...I’m sorry. We have to focus on him.”
“So what exactly is the plan here?” Iris asked. “Why did you get us all together like this?”
“Because I want to know if any of you are going to be willing to testify against him,” I explained. Iris sucked in a sharp breath.
“Testify?” she replied, her eyes flashing with fear. “I...I don’t know if I can do something like that...”
“It’s okay,” I assured her. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. Just hearing your story is an amazing help.”
“I’ll testify,” Jane cut in suddenly, like she had made her mind up right there on the spot. I glanced over to her in surprise.
“You will?”
“Me too,” Julia added. “I can testify. I want to look him in the eye and tell him just what he did to me. I’ve lived with it alone for long enough. I don’t want to keep it that way.”
I felt a smile spread up my face before I could stop it. This was a huge step forward. The more people we had on our side willing to go on record against him, the easier it was going to be to make this work. There would be so much evidence, so much proof of the pattern he’d exerted over each of us. And maybe Iris would come around eventually. She was clearly still going through it, the memories all too fresh for her, but once she saw how much we would be able to do with her help, she might be willing to step up.
Madison and I exchanged a grin. This was exactly what we had been looking for to bring down both Tony and his father. Irrevocable proof that they had been using their power for dangerous purposes. Tony had left a trail of women behind him, all damaged by his abuse, but if he thought we were going to be scared into keeping our silence any longer, well, he had a whole other think coming.
“We need to do some more research into the McCarthys,” Madison remarked as Julia reached for her coffee with a shaky hand.
“Yeah, this will be enough to cause trouble for Tony, but we might need more to pull his father into it,” I agreed. “We need to dig up something else on him, his businesses, find some way to connect him to what Tony did. I’m sure Tony had to have abused the company credit card at some point when he was with one of us.”
Another silence fell between us. There was something so strange about being here, all together, with one specific thing in common. All of us had been through a kind of hell most people would never even have been able to imagine, and I hoped it stayed that way for them. To be drawn together by something so dark and traumatic, it wasn’t something I had ever experienced before, and I was still trying to wrap my head around how it made me feel.
“And if we can find that girl who took a restraining order out against him, that would be the icing on top,” I muttered.
“You think she would want to get involved with this?” Madison asked in surprise. “I mean, someone like that, she’s gone to pretty extreme lengths to make sure she never has to see that guy again...”
“Yeah, but if she knows it’s to help with something like this, she’s going to see it differently,” I reasoned. “She wants to see him put away more than any one of us. She got a restraining order against him, and heaven only knows what he did to her to cause that...”
I shivered at the thought. I could still remember the way he had slammed my head into that wall, the stars that danced around the edges of my vision, that helpless, useless feeling as I realized the mess I had gotten myself into. Had he done the same to that woman who had gotten the restraining order against him? Something worse? I didn’t even want to think how much darker it could get...
“Yeah, that’s a good point,” Madison agreed, pulling me out of the spiral rushing through my mind right now. This was what he would have wanted—he would have wanted me so scared about what was going to happen next that I couldn’t even think about doing what was right for myself. I hated that he still had such a hold on me, but that wasn’t going to be the case for much longer. I would make sure of it.
We talked for the rest of the afternoon, ordering in some food to eat together. Once we had put the topic of Tony behind us, we moved on to other things—finding other ways that we could connect with one another, that had nothing at all to do with the awful man who had pulled us together in the first place.
I was tired by the time I heard Warren roll up outside Madison’s place. Pulling on my coat, I leaned over to give Madison a huge hug.
“Thank you for having us here today,” I murmured to her. “You have no idea how much of a difference it made.”
“Oh, trust me, I do,” she replied, smiling as she pulled back. “You call me if you need anything, okay? I’m going to sit up with the girls a little longer, see what else they might share now they’re a bit more relaxed.”
“Don’t push them too hard,” I warned her, and she nodded in agreement, though I could see the flash in her eyes—the same thing I often felt in my own system, that dedication to bringing him down. After so many years wondering, wishing someone would step in and help, we were the closest we had ever been to getting justice for what he had done to us. It was tantalizing, and I wanted nothing more than to dive head-first into it and forget about everything that had come before.
I stepped out of her front door, to find Warren leaning on the car and waiting for me. I greeted him with a kiss, standing on my tiptoes to plant my lips against his.
He winced slightly as our mouths met, and I pulled back at once.
“Are you okay?” I asked him, frowning. I peered at his face, but I couldn’t make out much in the dark half-light outside Madison’s place. Unless...wait, was that the beginning of a bruise on his chin?
“I’m fine,” he replied, but I could tell from his gritted teeth and clenched jaw that he was anything but.
“What the hell happened?” I demanded, and he jerked his head toward the door.
“Come on, let’s get home,” he told me, trying to dodge the question. I planted my hands on my hips and stared up at him pointedly.
“I’m not getting in there until you tell me what happened,” I warned him. He paused for a moment, considering before he answered.
“How about you get in, and I’ll tell you on the way home?” he suggested. I parted my lips to argue with him again, but a wave of tiredness hit me hard. Maybe it would be a better idea to just get back and get some rest.
And hope that whatever had happened to him today wasn’t as serious as it looked.
