till then I hadn’t said those words to a single soul, not even to my sister, but that day the words just came right out. Finally, I’d dared to push open that heavy metal door that I thought was protecting me and told someone our dirty little secret. My knees went wobbly with relief.
It was months before I ran into her again, in the shampoo aisle at the drugstore. She told me her husband had become a new man. Bringing her coffee in the mornings, tucking sweet notes in her work bag, calling her just because. He was trying so hard, she said around a stiff, synthetic smile, and my blood turned to ice and my fingers tingled. I looked at Sabine and I saw me, all those years ago. Before I understood that a backhand was the beginning, not the end, of a cycle.
I took her hand, squeezed it until the bones slid under her skin. “This is what they do, Sabine. They create perfect, perfectly happy moments so that when the bad ones come again, and they will, we will remember those perfect moments and stay.”
The understanding that crept up her face was identical to the one that was blooming in my chest. No woman wants to admit their marriage is over. We want to keep loving the person we once loved. We want the dream, the fairy tale of forever and ever after. To leave is to admit defeat.
But it was that moment in the drugstore, warning a stranger off going down my path, when I knew I had to do the same. I needed to get off this path, too. I needed to break this cycle of tenderness and brutality. Even if parts of me got broken in the process.
Sabine is the one who helped me come up with a plan—to skim off the grocery money, to make you think I’ve gone one way and then go another, to change my name and my hair, to hide in plain sight. She started volunteering at shelters, both for herself and for me. She interviewed the women there, researched what worked and what got women killed. She was like a graduate student with a thesis, single-minded and thorough.
She fed her findings to me in bite-size chunks—in the locker room at the gym, at the water fountains at the park, in whispers while pumping our gas. We never chose the same place twice, and we never put anything in writing.
We were so careful, and yet you found her anyway.
But that day at the open house, I came to say goodbye.
“You’re leaving? You’re really going through with it?” Her eyes widened like they did when she first saw me, only this time not with surprise but with pride. As much as she encouraged me to leave you, as many times as she told me I could, I think a bigger part of her never thought I’d do it. I’d been with you for so long, she didn’t think that I dared.
I nodded. “I am.”
“Do you know where you’re going?”
I nodded again. Tulsa, then a roundabout route to Atlanta, but I kept that part to myself. Sabine wouldn’t want to know, and I wouldn’t want to tell her. She already knew too much.
“And what about his friends? Those cops you thought might be watching you. How do you know they won’t follow?”
“I don’t. But the whole department is at a training in Little Rock today. Anger management, if you can believe the irony. Anyway, they’re all there until four. If you’ve ever thought of robbing a bank, today would be a good day to do it.”
She laughed. “Speaking of banks, how much money do you have?”
“Not quite four thousand, including what’s on Nick’s card.” Sabine knew Nick because he was her idea. She was the one who told me how to set up the account, the one who dug him up from God knows where. She didn’t tell me, and I didn’t ask, though by then she was volunteering at that battered women’s shelter so I had my suspicions. But it was an unspoken agreement between us, to share only the most essential information, nothing more, a need-to-know basis. She’d lived here all her life, too, and she was all too aware of how much power you had in this town, how many people were watching. The less we knew about each other, the better.
She fumbled through her bag on the island, pulling out a wad of cash crumpled from her