Chase’s hands settled on her shoulders, and he leaned down and whispered, “I love you,” knowing somehow that she desperately needed to hear it this morning even after the night they’d shared.
She glanced up at him only to see so much worry and regret in his eyes.
“Don’t open that,” he implored. “There’s nothing but pain in there.” He reached down to take the envelope, but she put her hand over his and held it there.
“I need to see.”
“You know their story. You don’t need to see it.” He was trying to tell her something about what the pictures showed.
Her heart raced in her chest because of his warning, but it didn’t stop her. She had to know. She needed to see. She couldn’t keep running from a past that all too often was thrust front and center in her life.
She slipped the envelope free and pulled out the dozen or so Polaroids.
The one on top was a picture of her mother in a sundress standing in what looked like a park or maybe a field, smiling and looking at something in the distance. It didn’t appear she even knew someone was taking her picture.
“You look so much like her.” Chase stood close, his hand on her shoulder now. “You have her smile.”
Shelby hadn’t smiled often enough in her life before Eliza showed up and made her smile every day. She wished her mother had been able to smile like that when she’d had Shelby.
She started to switch the picture but stalled when Chase said, “Don’t. Just hold on to that one. That’s all you need. That’s her, happy and smiling and carefree.”
She looked up at him. “I want to, but I can’t.” Because she’d never been allowed to forget what happened.
And right now, she wished her grandparents had been able to tell her all the stories about the happy, smiling, carefree mom she never knew, instead of just the horrible end of her life.
He brushed his hand over her hair. “What he sees in the next pictures is not the reality of what they show. I don’t know why he gave these to you, but it’s clear that he’s hoping you see them together and believe that he really loved her, that she loved him back. That’s not what you’ll see at all.” He pointed to the picture of her smiling mom covering the rest of the Polaroids. “He captured her vibrant spirit in this one shot. This is who he saw while he held her hostage and looked at her all the days he held her. Her beauty. Her joy. And that’s what he took from her.Youdo not need to see how he destroyed her.”
A tear slipped down her cheek. She understood exactly what Chase was telling her. Knowing what happened and seeing it... two very different things. She knew it wouldn’t be easy, but she also couldn’t look away.
“I don’t know how to explain this, but I feel like she needs me to see him for who he really is so that I’ll know the monster in the story truly is as evil as I’ve been told. So I’ll know exactly what I’m up against when he triesto come for our daughter, and I’m prepared to see past nice words and softly spoken pleas to the conniving and brutal man he really is.”
“I won’t let him anywhere near either of you ever again.”
She appreciated the sentiment, but they both knew Chase couldn’t protect them 24/7.
She spread the photos on the table in a haphazard collage of sadness and madness.
Her focus shifted from one image to the next. Kyle smiling like the happiest man alive in all of them. Her mother’s face close to his in the selfies, the emotion in her eyes ranging from fear, to terror, to wide-eyed horror. The ones he took of just her, she looked scared in most, helpless in one, resigned in another, and always desperate. But one showed her looking off into the distance just like the first shot Shelby had seen, only she wasn’t happy and bright. No. She sat up against a metal bed, shoulders slumped, hands tied behind her back, wearing a dirty white men’s T-shirt, knees tucked into her belly, feet by her hands, bruises on her arms and legs, a split lip, a bruised cheek, and her face devoid of any emotion, her eyes as flat and dead as a corpse’s.
She held that photo up with the first one and stared at what Kyle Hodges had done to her mother.
Chase squeezed her shoulder. “What kind of man, a father, gives something like this to his child?”
“A monster,” she answered.
Chase crouched beside her, took her face in his hands, brushed his thumbs over her wet cheeks—it took her a second to realize she was crying—and turned her face to look at him. “We will use this and what he did to her to make sure he never sees Eliza or you ever again.We’ll start with the restraining order and getting a lawyer to fight any attempts he makes for visitation with Eliza.”
“Why can’t he just stay away? All I want to do is forget. But he won’t let me. This town won’t let me. Maybe it is time to leave and start over somewhere else.”
Chase shook his head. “Running away isn’t going to solve this. If you and Eliza are his new obsession, like he had with your mom, he’s not going to stop. It doesn’t matter where we go.”
That scared her all the way to her soul because they were talking about her precious Eliza.
She also loved that he said,wherewego.Meaning he was in this with her, and if they had to run to protect Eliza, he’d be right there by her side.
“Sometimes, sweetheart, you have to stand and fight.”
“Sometimes retreating is the only way to save lives.”