ONE
 
A thunderstorm was raging in Rachel Sorensen’s sleep. She was in an old barn, somewhere up north, far enough away from the city that the swaying trees outside the run-down structure could be called a forest. Rain came in between the old gray boards of the wall she was crouched against, splattering her face. Or were they tears that wet her cheeks? Because she knew she was hiding again—not until the bruises went away, but so that he wouldn’t add to them. Her shoulder still ached from where he’d wrenched her arm from its socket, two nights past.
A sudden thought came to her, and she looked frantically around the barn with the next flash of lightning. What if he was in the barn with her? What if this time, when he rammed the pistol up under her chin, he pulled the—
The thunder woke her.
She sat upright in her own bed, in her own apartment. The ache in her shoulder was just a memory. Her cheeks were damp—crying in her sleep again. But it had just been a dream, nothing more. One more false memory to add to the collection of real hurts and aches and bad memories that she was still trying to put behind her.
She looked out the window, hoping the view it gave of the park would calm her, then realized that it wasn’t raining. The sky was clear. Stars could be made out against the city’s light pollution, which rose for miles into the sky above the streets.
The thunder came again.
She turned her head once more, this time to the doorway of the bedroom.
It’s the door, she realized.
Her gaze went to the clock beside the bed. The digital readout told her it was past three in the morning. She shivered.
Please let this just be a dream, too, she thought.
Because she knew who it was at her door. Her therapist had explained it to her: no matter where she went or how well she hid her tracks, if he was determined enough, he would find her.
“You have to be prepared for that,” Dr. Caley had told her, sympathetically.
But sympathy was no help right now. She started to reach for the phone, but knew it was futile. By the time the police came, he’d be gone again, leaving her to deal with their endless questions. By the time they came, she could be dead.
He was here now. Pounding on the wood with his thick knuckles. Hands once gentle, turned hard and angry.
“We just haven’t got the manpower to put a squad car outside your building every night,” the detective had explained to her, apologetically.
Apologies were no help either.
There was a lull. He’d stopped his assault on the door. But now she could hear his voice, muffled by the door, but all too familiar.
“I’m your goddamn husband!” he shouted.
She buried her face against the pillow.
“No, you’re not,” she whispered.
He was nothing to her now. He should be the past, lost, forgotten, but he wouldn’t let her give it up. He wouldn’t give it up. There had been times when her body was a road map of bruises, the time he threw her down the stairs and broke her collarbone. It could have been her neck. Times, aYl tYiose times, too many times, and then he was so sorry after, so sorry, he’d go back on his medication, he promised he would, he didn’t know what had gotten into him, because he loved her, he really did, and she, God help her, had believed him. Time after time, she had believed him.
She left him twice before the divorce, and both times he tracked her down and brought her back. And showed her how much he loved her with his anger and his shouting and his fists and finally the gun shoved up under her chin.
Such a calm, kind man, it was hard to believe, their mutual friends told her when she left the third and final time, ran to a shelter for battered women, let them hide her until the court date. But they didn’t know about his condition. They didn’t see him when he stopped taking
the medication, when his easy good nature slipped away like the loose mask it was, and the depression began, and then the paranoia, and then the anger.
No one could understand. Not their well-meaning friends. Not her own mother telling her that it was just the pressures at his work, Frank really loved her, marriage could be a bumpy road but they’d get through the hard times.
Rachel’s body was healed by the time she went to court, but she had the pictures to prove what he had done to her—photos taken by Sarah Bell at the shelter. Thank God for Sarah. Thank God for Frank’s doctor, who explained, yes, Mr. Bedley did have an unfortunate condition; it could be controlled, unless he refused to take the medication that had been prescribed to help him deal with his problem. Thank God for all the land strangers who believed and helped when those in her own social circle-Frank’s friends, she’d learned all too painfully—and even her own family hesitated, looked awkward, kept talking about reconciliation when all Rachel wanted was freedom.
There were three locks and a safety chain on the door, but as Rachel lay there, listening to her ex-husband pound on the door, they seemed a very flimsy defense now. Trembling, she got up from the bed and crept down the hall toward the door.
It shook as he began to hammer against it again.
She looked around her untidy living room for something to shove against the door. Frank would hate this room. A coffee mug and a plate full of crumbs still sitting on the side table beside the chair where she’d been reading last night. Piles of magazines on the coffee table. CDs scattered across the top of the stereo cabinet in a disorganized jumble. The jacket she’d worn home from work last night still tossed across the back of the sofa.
Cause for a beating—if this was their home, if they were still married. But it wasn’t. The room belonged to her. The apartment was hers, and he had no right to be outside her door, still tormenting her.
There was nothing to put against the door. She wasn’t strong enough to move any of the furniture on her own. And that was the problem with being a woman, wasn’t it? They were all stronger than you, all those men with their fists and their anger. Every day she read in the paper about the horrors husbands and fathers forced upon those they claimed to love.
Because they were stronger. Because they could. Because they had pressures and stress and it was understandable, wasn’t it, that they needed an outlet? It’s not like they meant to hurt anybody, was it? It’s not like they reveled in their power with their boyish grins and strangers’ eyes.
The pounding stopped again.
“I know you’re in there, Rachel,” he said, his voice calm, so calm, so reasonable. “Please let me in. I just want to talk to you, that’s all. I just want to explain things to you.” She heard a heavy thump as he leaned against the door. “I’ve changed. Things’ll be different this time. I promise you.”
Rachel stood in front of the door, hugging herself to stop shaking.
“Rachel, honey. Please.”
There was a time when she would have believed him, but she didn’t know that person anymore. That woman she had been—that poor, gullible woman, frightened of her own shadow—had finally grown stronger. She remembered all too clearly how his whispered promises turned into her screams. She...