“He’s back in town. Just got out of jail.”
Her words sounded far away, and I felt the panic begin with the same damn cluster of spark plugs in my abdomen. My hands trembled as a paralyzing fear spread through my body like icy, liquid metal. “He’s in town?”
Faith scooted closer as Mags reassured me, “He can’t contact you or be within a certain distance of you. Your restraining order is still active for another year.”
I gulped. A year, and then I would have to get it renewed. Fuck. I squeezed my eyes shut. Gerald was a monster in human form. I could still feel the physical and emotional pain he was responsible for.
I shook my head and got up from the swing. “He doesn’t have any hold over me anymore.”
But if that were true, why did panic take hold of me when I heard his name?
Mags jumped to her feet with a grin. “Damn right!”
“He can’t hurt you anymore, Eve.” Faith climbed to her feet.
I took a deep breath. “Think the pizza’s here?”
Faith shrugged. “Let’s find out.”
We went back inside to join the guys and the little one. As much as I attempted to push the thoughts of Gerald to the back of my mind, he pushed through and haunted my thoughts. Even after a year of therapy and being out of his grasp, the mere thought of him shackled me with the same fear that kept me tethered to him for so long.
I loathed the woman he made me become, and I would not go back to being the shell of who I really am.
Dread crept down my spine as my stomach filled with lead. Where the fuck were they? I thumbed through the envelopes I had hidden under the old bench in the hayloft. I had a thick stack of forty-three letters. Only thirty-nine were accounted for. I checked, twice.
Adrenaline flooded my system; saliva thickened in my throat, and beads of sweat trickled down my brow. Those letters contained my deepest, sickest fucking secrets. They shared my personal feelings and every shitty detail of what I’d done overseas. Nobody could read them—not even who I addressed the letters to, especially not her.
Fear sat on my chest like a cement block. Emotional scars were written on those letters like a narrative, telling down to the last fucking detail of my life in the Army. Every soldier needed an outlet, a coping mechanism. My outlet was the letters. I needed them.
“Flynn? Are you in here?” Ma’s voice bounced off the barn walls.
My brows bumped together, and it clicked. Ma had seen those letters when I came home, and she watched me storm off to the barn. I was on autopilot, wasting no time as I bustled down the hayloft. Ma’s eyes were crinkled at the sides as she scrutinized my surely fuming state.
My shoulders moved up and down with my ragged breathing. “What the fuck did you do?” I seethed.
She flinched, her eyes wandering toward the stack of letters in my hand before she met my gaze with a guilty expression. “They were addressed to her. I thought… I thought I was helping.”
“Helping? You just fucked everything up!”
“Flynn, I’m sorry. I just thought—”
“I know what you thought!” My voice echoed around us before I held my tongue. Spinning around, I stalked off toward the house.
Pain was supposed to dull with time. The logic behind it was that the memory was supposed to become less fresh. I couldn’t bear the thought of forgetting what I’d done, the brothers I’d lost in combat, and the person I had to become. All of it was written in the letters so I could reread them and the memories wouldn’t be lost.
Letters in hand, I snagged a pack of beer from the fridge and hopped in my truck. I peeled out of the drive and drove on muscle memory to a place I hadn’t been in a decade.
The comforting office was painted grey, and it had a floor-to-ceiling window that faced the main road. On the grey desk was a laptop, a notebook lying open, and a stack of papers sitting under a paperweight. In the left hand corner, the heater blasted on medium.
I gnawed my bottom lip. “I think it’s the flashbacks and the dreams. I keep reliving the night it happened, and it’s so vivid.”
“That’s exactly why.” My therapist, Ivory Howell, nodded her head. “We’ve been working together for over a year, Evelyn. You are a strong-willed woman with a good head on her shoulders. It’s normal to become anxious after discovering that he is back in town.”
I nodded. This woman had been my rock since I left Gerald. She was the reason I had such a grasp on my anxiety. She was a few years older than I was with curly blonde hair and brown eyes. We’d become close over the course of my sessions, and I would never trust any other therapist but her. “Makes sense. But how do I stop it?”
She pursed her lips. “You keep your thoughts positive and remain strong. You’re the only one that can control your anxiety, and you’ve done a damn good job at it. Don’t let his presence unbalance you. He can’t get to you anymore.”
I shut my eyes and let her reassurance wash over me. He couldn’t even come close to me—not without risking more jail time. I was in control, and had changed from being the submissive girl he could push around to a woman who wouldn’t take his shit.
I opened my eyes and smiled. “You’re absolutely right.”
The corner of her mouth quirked upward. “Let’s chat about something more positive, shall we? What about Flynn Rockwell? I heard he was back in town.”
My cheeks flared with embarrassment. I’d told her everything about our past and she was the only one who knew just how hung up on him I’d been—and still was. “I had dinner at his mom’s with him a couple of nights ago.
