Page 76 of Stay Away from Him

“Is that what this is about? Optics for your goddamn murder trial?”

Thomas’s face twisted in agony. “Don’t make it like that. I want you standing by me because I’m about to face the challenge of my lifetime—staying out of prison, protecting my reputation, being there for my daughters. I need the woman I love beside me while I face it.”

“And what about whatI’mfacing?” Melissa said, so mad she could barely see, blotches of color flashing in front of her eyes. “My ex-husband is going to try to get full custody of my son. Myson, Thomas. He’s going to haul me into a courtroom and tell a judge that I’m a bad mother, that I’m putting my son in danger. And because of you, he’s got a case. Because of what you did.”

Because of what you did.The words dropped from her lips and fell on the table between them. A silence descended in which Thomas looked like he was wondering what she meant bywhat you did—and maybe Melissa was wondering too. Was she only referring to Thomas’s attacking Carter, sending him to the hospital? Or did she also mean killing his wife? Had she gone from being one of Thomas’s defenders to believing he was guilty?

She wasn’t sure, and she also wasn’t sure if it mattered. Something had been broken between them, and it would take time to put it back together, if it could even be repaired. In the meantime, Thomas had a trial to face—and Melissa had her own problems to deal with.

“I need to focus on my son right now,” she said.

Thomas breathed out, seeming to deflate. “So that’s it. This is over.”

“Maybe. Maybe once the dust settles, we can get back together, see if there’s anything still here.”

Even as she said it, Melissa knew what she was saying would never happen. It sounded absurd in her own ears. A perfunctory reassurance, an empty promise of a possibility that could never be. She was sure Thomas could hear it too.

“Goodbye, Thomas,” she said. “Good luck to you.”

He didn’t answer, and she left the room under the shroud of his hurt, angry silence.

Her vision blurred on her way to the exit, the hard lines of the cinder block and the metal bars at the checkpoints warping and floating, like the swirl of one shade of paint mixing into another. Only when the cool air of the outside hit her cheeks did she realize she was crying.

Chapter 18

As Melissa drove out of the parking lot, she spotted something up the street. Across a two-lane road with a narrow strip of gravel shoulder on either side, a residential neighborhood sat opposite the jail. On an intersecting street a couple hundred feet down the road from her, a car was parked. It looked like Thomas’s, but of course he couldn’t have been driving it. It was the car that went missing from his garage that morning. Melissa squinted and spotted some movement behind the windows.

Rhiannon and Kendall? They’d either followed her to the county jail, or they’d come by themselves, keeping watch—wanting to be close to their dad.

Melissa had intended to turn the other way down the road, but instead, she cranked the wheel in their direction and sped toward the car with a staccato squeal of tire rubber. When she reached the street the car was parked on, she made a sharp turn and then screeched to a stop on a diagonal just ahead of the car’s front bumper, blocking escape. Then she got out of the car and walked toward it.

When she reached the driver’s side door and craned down to look in, Melissa only saw Rhiannon, looking sheepish with herhands on the wheel. Kendall was nowhere to be found. Melissa signaled for Rhiannon to roll down the window.

“Where’s Kendall?”

Rhiannon shook her head. “I don’t know where she is. I was looking for her.”

“She’s not with you?”

“I woke up in the middle of the night, and she wasn’t in her room. Her bike was gone.” A quaver in Rhiannon’s voice told Melissa just how worried she was about her younger sister. Melissa couldn’t blame her. She was a fifteen-year-old girl wandering the city, apparently with nothing but her bicycle. Reeling from her dad’s arrest. Confused, not thinking straight.

And maybe Rhiannon wasn’t thinking straight either. She was older than Kendall, and she affected a worldly aloofness in the way that only seventeen-year-old girls could—but beneath that exterior, she was still a girl in most of the ways that mattered. She was scared and confused too, and unlike Melissa, she didn’t have the luxury of walking away from Thomas. It was her last living parent locked up across the road, facing down the prospect of life in prison. Rhiannon was at serious risk of becoming an effective orphan, and the brokenness behind her eyes told Melissa that on some level she knew it.

“Are you okay?” Melissa asked.

Rhiannon folded her top lip over the bottom and looked forward. She closed her eyes, and the movement of her eyelids scraped tears onto her cheeks.

“This is your fault,” Rhiannon said. “Before you came, everything was fine. We were happy.”

Melissa felt an urge to argue, to defend herself. She didn’t choose any of this, after all. Thomas pursuedher. But it felt more important in that moment to empathize with Rhiannon, to meet her where she was at, rather than argue with her.

“I know,” Melissa said. “I know it must feel like all these terrible things started happening when I came into your dad’s life. And I’m sorry. I am.”

“Why were you talking to those people?”

Melissa blinked, not sure what Rhiannon was talking about. She thought Rhiannon was angry at her for what had happened between her dad and Carter—she was right that he’d never have gone to jail for assault if it wasn’t for Melissa. But now it seemed like there was something else on her mind.

“What people?” Melissa asked.

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