“I’m going to head to the little boys’ room, and then we’ll go.” Her father took that chance to bug out of the awkward conversation, leaving her to be the bad guy.
As he left the room, he sent a look to Tad, as if to say, they’re in your care.
Telling Tad to watch them, she was sure.
Miranda had no doubt he’d had someone in California draw up appropriate paperwork to at least get her into some kind of mental health facility for a check. After all, he would’ve argued, what woman just up and ran, changing her identity, for no reason?
He’d used her earlier trauma, incident-induced and long gone, to lay doubt with others about her current mental state. It was cruel in the extreme.
And he’d already let her know, the night she’d run all those years ago, that in North Carolina, as in most states, grandparents could go to court to be granted visitation rights.
“Mom? What’s happening?” For the first time Ethan looked scared.
As soon as the bathroom door shut, Tad grabbed the pack she’d dropped to the floor. “Run this out to my car, Ethan,” he said with enough authority that Ethan did as he asked. “Let’s go.” He didn’t touch her. But the look in his eye... He was giving her a choice.
He’d get her out of here if she wanted to go.
She didn’t trust him. Didn’t even feel she knew him anymore.
But for whatever reason, he’d offered her the chance she’d been waiting for.
Chapter 29
“Marry me.”
They’d been driving north and mostly east for a couple of hours. Before they’d even left town, Tad had her take the SIM cards out of their phones. And in some obscure little burb half an hour into the country, he’d traded his SUV for a newer model, complete with a DVD system and drop-down screen for the back seat. He’d told Ethan they were going on an adventure.
“To Yellowstone?” Ethan had asked.
Tad had never confirmed or denied the question, he’d just talked about various natural forests, ones he’d been to, ones he’d liked.
And for the past ten minutes or so, her son, with headphones on and a movie they’d purchased for him at a gas station, had been asleep.
“Marry you,” she said, keeping her voice low, but letting her incredulousness seep through.
What she kept to herself was the warm delight that shot through her at the very idea.
“We’ll be in Vegas by eleven. We could be married before midnight.”
And the world thought she’d lost her mind.
“Why would I marry you?” she asked him. “You used me. Set me up. Because of you, I’m having to leave everything I care about and expose my child to a life on the run.”
“For one thing, if we’re married, he can’t force you to go with him for emotional or mental evaluation. Not even for your own good. I’m guessing those papers are signed by a doctor who trusts and believes him and signed based on things your father has reported not on meetings with you,
which could put him in danger of losing his license, not to mention jail time, but it’s not like you have time to prove all that. If we’re married I’d be the only one who could request evaluation.”
She hadn’t thought of that. If she was married, some of her father’s power over her would naturally disappear. Psychiatric papers or not.
She had to think. The future. Ethan.
“We could get married, and then head back to town,” he told her. “Take a day to give Ethan his adventure and he could be back in school by the end of the week.”
It sounded so easy.
And crazy.
Anything that seemed too good to be true usually was.