Rating: ★★★★☆ Tags: Mystery Detective, General, Fiction

Poor darling
.
Now he is here, dashing in a white midsummer suit
(Desi changes wardrobes monthly – what was appropriate
for June would not work for July – I’ve always admired the
discipline, the precision of the Collings’s costuming). He
looks good. I don’t. I am too aware of my humid glasses,
the extra roll of flesh at my waist.
‘Amy.’ He touches my cheek, then pulls me in for an
embrace.
Not a hug, Desi doesn’t hug, it’s more like being
encased by something tailored just to you. ‘Sweetheart.
You can’t imagine. That call. I thought I’d gone insane. I
thought I was making you up! I’d daydreamed about it, that
somehow you were alive, and then. That call. Are you
okay?’
‘I am now,’ I say. ‘I feel safe now. It’s been awful.’ And
then I burst into tears, actual tears, which hadn’t been the
plan, but they feel so relieving, and they fit the moment so

---

perfectly, that I let myself unravel entirely. The stress drips
off me: the nerve of enacting the plan, the fear of being
caught, the loss of my money, the betrayal, the
manhandling, the pure wildness of being on my own for the
first time in my life.
I look quite pretty after a cry of about two minutes –
longer than that and the nose goes runny, the puffiness sets
in, but up to that, my lips gets fuller, my eyes bigger, my
cheeks flushed. I count as I cry into Desi’s crisp shoulder,
one Mississippi, two Mississippi
– that river again – and I
curb the tears at one minute and forty-eight seconds.
‘I’m sorry I couldn’t get here earlier, sweetheart,’ Desi
says.
‘I know how full Jacqueline keeps your schedule,’ I
demur. Desi’s mom is a touchy subject in our relationship.
He studies me. ‘You look 
very
… different,’ he says.
‘So full in the face, especially. And your poor hair is—’ He
catches himself. ‘Amy. I just never thought I could be so
grateful for anything. Tell me what’s happened.’
I tell a Gothic tale of possessiveness and rage, of
Midwest steak-and-potato brutality, barefoot pregnancy,
animalistic dominance. Of rape and pills and liquor and
fists. Pointed cowboy boots in the ribs, fear and betrayal,
parental apathy, isolation, and Nick’s final telling words:
‘You can never leave me. I will kill you. I will find you no
matter what. You are mine.’
How I had to disappear for my own safety and the
safety of my unborn child, and how I needed Desi’s help.
My savior. My story would satisfy Desi’s craving for ruined
women – I was now the most damaged of them all. Long
ago, back in boarding school, I’d told him about my father’s

---

nightly visits to my bedroom, me in a ruffly pink nightgown,
staring at the ceiling until he was done. Desi has loved me
ever since the lie, I know he pictures making love to me,
how gentle and reassuring he would be as he plunged into
me, stroking my hair. I know he pictures me crying softly as I
give myself to him.
‘I can’t ever go back to my old life, Desi. Nick will kill
me. I’ll never feel safe. But I can’t let him go to prison. I just
wanted to disappear. I didn’t realize the police would think
he
did it.’
I glance prettily toward the band onstage, where a
skeletal septuagenarian is singing about love. Not far from
our table, a straight-backed guy with a trim mustache
tosses his cup toward a trash can near us and bricks (a
term I learned from Nick). I wish I’d picked a more
picturesque spot. And now the guy is looking at me, tilting
his head toward the side, in exaggerated confusion. If he
were a cartoon, he’d scratch his head, and it would make a
rubbery