Chapter 12 - The Clean Break
We didn't spend another night in the city.
While Nora and Maya spent their final two days in the recovery ward, I hired an emergency moving crew to clear out our old apartment. Every single piece of furniture that my mother or sisters had sat on, touched, or ruined went straight into the dumpster behind the complex. I didn't want their residue in our future.
I took the twenty-five-thousand-dollar cashier's check from my grandfather and walked directly into the First National Bank. I deposited twenty thousand into an irrevocable trust fund for Maya’s future education, and used the remaining five thousand to put down a first, last, and security deposit on a small single-family home twenty-five miles west, tucked into the quiet foothills of the Pine Ridge valley.
The new house had a wrap-around wooden porch, a huge front yard surrounded by ancient oak trees, and a kitchen filled with natural morning light.
When I carried Nora up the front steps and walked her into the spacious, clean living room, she stopped dead in her tracks.
The scent of fresh pine and lavender filled the air. In the corner of the room stood a handcrafted oak crib, fully assembled, with a soft yellow quilt draped over the rail.
"Ryan..." Nora gasped, her hands flying to her mouth as fresh tears filled her eyes. "You did all this in two days?"
"I did it for you," I said, resting my forehead against hers while Maya slept peacefully in the carrier against my chest. "No more broken locks. No more stolen groceries. No more fear. This is our fort. Nobody enters this house without your permission."
She buried her face in my shoulder, weeping tears of pure, unadulterated relief. For the first time in the four years we had been together, the tension in her shoulders vanished completely.
That night, for the first time in months, I didn't set an alarm for five in the morning. I had resigned from the freight warehouse and accepted a position as an operations supervisor at a local lumber mill five miles down the road. Regular hours. Decent pay. Weekends off.
As I lay beside Nora in our new master bedroom, listening to the gentle crickets outside and the soft breathing of our daughter in the bassinet beside us, my old cell phone buzzed on the nightstand.
It was an automated collect call from the state women's correctional facility.
May you like
You have a collect call from an inmate: PAIGE MERCER. Press 1 to accept—
I didn't press anything. I powered the phone down, removed the SIM card with a paperclip, snapped the plastic chip in half, and tossed the pieces into the trash can.
