Ian guided me to follow.
He moved into a sitting room down the hall where he flipped on the television to the local news.
A reporter’s voice came through the speakers. “Dearborne’s children were reported missing late last night. Dearborne shared joint custody with the children’s mother, Grace Dearborne. Grace was spotted leaving her attorney’s home, Ian Jacobs, in the early morning hours on November eleventh just before dawn. It’s speculated Jacobs and Grace Dearborne initiated the affair in a bid to damage Dearborne’s senatorial campaign. More news on this breaking story at the top of the hour.”
The whole time she spoke, a reel played. A picture of me leaving Ian’s building in the middle of the night, my hair a sexed up, matted mass, another of us on my grandmother’s porch, hidden away in the shrubs and somehow still in plain sight of a camera, another of Ian at the strip club.
Ian froze at my side.
Ice cold.
Rigid.
Detached.
“Ian,” I whispered.
Without saying a word, he turned on his heel and strode out the door.
And I was sure I’d never felt so alone in my whole life.
Thirty-Seven
Grace
Silence hung in the cab of Ian’s car, the only sound the hum of his engine and the tiny tremors of sorrow that kept scraping up my raw throat.
Everything hurt.
Excruciatingly severe.
Torment wracked through every cell in my body, steadily pumped by the slivered remains of my heart.
Ian stared straight ahead as he sped down the road, one hand gripping the steering wheel, his bloodied knuckles white and blanched as he squeezed the other fisted on his thigh.
The man was emitting so much energy he could light up the entire town.
But that energy had morphed.
Had become something dark and bitter and ugly.
His soft words from last night vanished with the reality of what we’d done.
He hadn’t said anything during the time we’d been forced to watch the evidence of our affair play out on the screen as if it were sordid and dirty. As if it were made of greed and corruption when I was sure I’d never experienced anything so pure and right.
Jace, Faith and I had just stood there.
Shocked.
Broken in the truest sense.
Ian had left me there to listen to him where he’d roared and moaned, his fists pummeling the wall as he’d raged outside.
Five minutes later, he’d returned.
Hatred and vacancy in his eyes.
It was the first time I’d thought he’d resembled what he believed himself to be.
A demon.
Capable of anything.
He’d simply said, “We have to go. Now.”
Faith had scrambled to gather my children’s things, and we’d loaded them into Ian’s car.
The whole time, Ian hadn’t uttered a single word.
Now, the car screeched as he took a corner hard. I swore, my mind had to be racing just as fast, searching for a solution.
Fighting the hopelessness that threatened to seep in and take over.
I refused to succumb to Reed’s demands.
Refused to succumb to the despair that crashed and covered, the weight of it making it impossible to breathe.
The tires squealed again as Ian took the last turn into my neighborhood, and he slowed as he navigated the suburban streets to my home.
A sanctuary.
A place of peace and love.
And somehow it was Ian who’d come to feel like home.
He pulled to the curb, and my shattered heart heaved in a shock of pain when I looked over and saw the utter devastation on his face.
Different from mine.
A shroud of guilt covered him whole. The man vibrated with self-condemnation. A dark cloud crawling his flesh.
Shaking, I fumbled out of the car, still barely able to stand.
My bleeding heart was somewhere in my throat.
Thick and knotted.
Suffocating.
A crisp breeze twisted through the intense blue sky that murmured of the coming winter.
Like a cold, quiet whisper.
A premonition.
Chills flashed across my skin, and my stomach twisted in awareness and dread.
I couldn’t control the shaking in my hands as I opened the back door of his car.
Grief streaked through my insides, and I nearly fell to my knees when I looked at my children’s things.
Their little suitcases and their seats.
The unbearable reality slammed me.
He took them.
He took them.
Grief took over everything.
Every cell.
Every molecule.
He took them.
A sob ripped from my chest, and my eyes blurred with the tears that I couldn’t keep at bay.
They fell. Fell as violently as the anger that infiltrated to the marrow.
Ian came around to my side, the man a dark, gray storm, those crazy-colored eyes the strangest I’d ever seen.
Swirling with rage and anger and a terrifying sort of desperation.
He gathered up everything in one fell swoop, shifting on his heel and stalking up the walkway, rigid anger as he waited at the door.
I felt as if I were crawling as I followed. Moving against the current. Cutting against the grain.
Everything wrong.
So wrong.
Legs heavy, I moved around him and unlocked the door, and he set everything just inside.
He refused to look at me, jaw clenched and muscles bunched and twitching, the designs etched into his skin alive, exposed by the tee shirt he wore.