“I have to protect my mother from her husband.”
“Your stepfather?” Kaeden asked.
She shook her head. “No!” Never that. Turner had never been that to her. “He and my mom met after I’d moved out so he was never my stepfather.”
Kaeden nodded his head but didn’t speak. One hand rubbed her back while the other rested on her legs, squeezing, letting her know he was ready to support her.
She poured it all out. All the hurt and fear and terror of their lives over the last few years.
“My mom was swept away by him. I didn’t even know they were dating until she told me they were going away together. They were gone for three months, traveling to Europe and Asia. When they came home, they were married.”
She took a deep breath, remembering. “She was so happy. I didn’t like him much, but he made her so happy, I didn’t say anything. Not that I could say anything by then.
“Instead, I stayed away. They lived in Texas and I was hours away by plane so it was easy to make excuses not to visit. But then my mom started to change. I could hear it in her voice when we talked. She always tried to sound so chipper and happy like there was nothing wrong but I could tell something was. I went to visit and on the surface there was nothing wrong.”
Kaeden kept up the steady rhythm on her back and Jane sank into him, needing that connection as she told her story.
“Turner Carson is a powerful man. He’s extremely wealthy and his businesses provide jobs for a huge portion of the city they live in. On top of that, he owns most of the buildings in town and a hell of a lot of the rental properties as well. He may not be the mayor of the city, but he might as well be its king.” She paused. “He’s used to getting his way.”
It was putting it mildly.
“He was controlling. I could see it in the way he treated my mom even though she tried so hard to make things look like nothing was wrong on the outside. I told her it was okay if she wasn’t happy. That she could leave. She said he didn’t hit her, that he wasn’t abusive but I know he was hurting her in other ways. He was cruel and manipulative. I could see him chipping away at her confidence, her independence. Every time I went back to visit, there was a little more of her gone. It was like she was a little closer to death each time I went. Walking and talking and playing her role, but some part of her was dying and I didn’t know how to stop it.”
There were tears streaming down her face now and Jane knew there was no way to stop them.
“They were married for four years before she decided to leave him. She didn’t tell me.” She swiped at the tears. “God I wish she had told me. If I had been there.”
Kaeden ran his hand over her leg. “What happened?”
“The whole town was so loyal to him. So damned loyal. She didn’t realize how much. She thought if she went to a lawyer it would stay confidential, the way it was supposed to be.”
“It didn’t?”
She could hear the edge in Kaeden’s voice.
She shook her head. “The lawyer didn’t tell Turner that she was planning to leave him, but he didn’t have to. He casually let it slip that she had come to see him. In the same sentence he mentioned maybe Turner could encourage my mom to pop in and see a woman who was a counselor and had an office in the same building.
“It was enough to send him into a rage. Of course, he hid that rage so well from the people around them. He even went to a fundraising gala they were scheduled to go to that night with my mom. My mom had been told by the lawyer to bide her time while he prepped the divorce papers for her, so she went with him to the event.”
Jane’s tears were slowing as the anger at what had happened began to take hold, battling down the despair she always felt when thinking about her mom.
“On the drive home, he told my mom he knew she’d been to the lawyer and that she was never going to leave him. That if she thought she was going to walk away from him, she had no idea who she was dealing with. That no one left him.”
Jane slowed, not wanting to tell the next part but knowing the story couldn’t be told part way. “She tried to tell him she was leaving. And that’s when he lost it. He didn’t say the words, but I think it was one of those things where if he wasn’t going to have her, no one would.”
The memories sliced at Jane’s heart, bringing out the bone deep ache that would never go away. She could see her mother’s terror in her mind, imagine the horror her mother must have felt when she realized what was happening.
“He reached over and unbuckled her seatbelt and then slammed her side of the car into a tree.”
Kaeden cursed under his breath, low and hard, and there was an almost deadly quality to it.
Jane kept going, needing to get it out. “He was hurt too, of course, but not badly. My mom suffered the worst of it. She survived and she can walk but her pelvis was broken in several places and there was damage to her legs and back. She’s in pain every day and needs ’round-the-clock care and medicine.”
Kaeden’s head fell to rest on hers and he pulled her in, hugging her close.
“She tried to tell a doctor what had happened, but no one in that city wanted to believe what was happening. They saw Turner as this great benefactor, the father of the town. And what we didn’t know was that he’d already begun to paint a picture of my mom as hysterical and unstable to the people around her for years. She hadn’t known it was happening but he’d been telling people how much she relied on him to keep her steady, that she was seeing doctors for mental health issues she didn’t have.”
She told him how they’d run away together after her mother had healed enough to be moved. That she’d sold her townhouse and her car, and they’d taken the jewelry Turner had given her mother and run with it, using it to buy her mother a new identity.