The Night Their Secret Was Recorded: How a Pregnant Wife Found Her Voice, Exposed a Hidden Marriage, Protected Her Unborn Child, and Built a Brand New Life Beyond Their Reach
Chapter 7
"Claire Marie."
That was all she said. Then her face folded in on itself, and she crossed the room in three steps and put her arms around me so gently that it felt as if she were holding something made of glass.
I hadn't cried in front of anyone all day. I cried then.
I cried for a long time, with my face against her cardigan, breathing in the smell of lavender soap and highway. She stroked my hair and said nothing, and I realized that no one had held me like that since my father's funeral. It hadn't occurred to me until that moment how long I had gone without being held by anyone who wanted nothing in return.
"I'm so sorry," she said finally, when the worst had passed. "I'm so sorry, sweetheart. I should have come. I felt it. I knew something was off, and I let them talk me out of it."
"Aunt Josie, it's not..."
"Every time I called, your mother-in-law answered your phone." She pulled back and looked at me with red, furious eyes. "Every time. She'd say you were resting, or at the store, or in the shower. Once she said you'd gone to bed with a headache at four in the afternoon. And Ethan never let you finish a sentence at the wedding, did you notice that? I noticed. I said to myself, Josephine, don't be the meddling aunt." She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth. "I let good manners keep me quiet."
"I let them keep me quiet too," I said. "For a year."
"That is not the same thing."
"Why didn't I leave?" It came out smaller than I intended. It was the question that had been circling me all day, waiting to land. "Everyone's going to ask. The lawyers. The papers. The neighbors. Why didn't she just leave?"
Josie was quiet for a moment. She took my hand in both of hers, and I saw how thin the skin had become across her knuckles. She had gotten old, I thought, in the two years since I'd seen her.
"Did your father ever build you a fence?" she asked.
I blinked. "What?"
"When you were little. Robert built half the fences in that town. He used to say a good fence never goes up all at once. You just set one post, and it doesn't look like much. Then the next one. Then the boards, one at a time, and every single board seems reasonable by itself. And one day you look around and you're standing in a yard with no gate." Her voice wobbled. "Nobody puts a cage around a person in a day, honey. They build it slowly, so you'll swear you walked in on your own."
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I stared at her.
"They built you a fence," she said. "And you climbed out of it anyway, with a baby on the way and a hole in your back. Don't you ever ask why it took you so long."
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