Page 25 of Tethered

“No, as long as you have a healthy dose of common sense to go along with it. I clearly didn’t. I must have drunk more than I realized because I woke up in a strange motel room, sore in places I had no right to be sore in. Eight weeks later, two pink lines confirmed the worst, and I was forced to return home tomy deeply devout Christian parents. They offered me a choice—marry the man who got me pregnant or sleep on the streets.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah, well, my parents were never very good at practicing what they preached. They cherry-picked the parts of the Bible that worked for them and ignored the rest.”

“Isn’t that always the fucking way?”

I swallow, thinking about a young Dawn dancing in a bar, her whole life ahead of her. I don’t doubt for a second that he was drawn to her youth and vitality. Older men take younger women for a variety of reasons—they’re easier to manipulate and bend to their will. They don’t have the life experience to recognize that it’s happening. They take them because a young, beautiful woman on an older man’s arm becomes a status symbol, a sign of the man’s virility or something equally as gross. They take them so they can try to absorb all that youth and vitality for themselves. And most of the time, they do, draining it from the woman they coveted, discarding her when she is nothing more than a shell of the person she could have been, before moving on to the next one.

Knowing his type, I doubt alcohol consumption had anything to do with Dawn’s choices that night. Her choices stopped being her own the second he likely dropped something in her glass and took her back to a cheap motel when she was too fucked-up to consent.

“How did you track him down?”

“I didn’t. I had no idea who he was. We lived a few hours south of here, and I couldn’t even remember his name. Imagine my surprise when he turned up on my parents’ doorstep a couple of weeks after I found out I was pregnant. He said he’d felt compelled to check on me. I was so desperate to get away from my parents that I didn’t see the red flags for what they were. I never hesitated when he told me he’d marry me and takeme away—not that my parents really gave me a choice to begin with.”

Convenient that he turned up just after she found out she was expecting. It’s almost like he knocked her up on purpose and kept tabs on her. I just don’t understand why. He obviously never liked kids, so I wonder what it was about Dawn that made him risk it.

“I moved here to be with him and the rest…well, you know. The parents of the other kids see me as some harlot or slut who baby-trapped him into being my sugar daddy when it couldn’t be further from the truth. They see the marks, the ones he’s not careful about, but nobody says anything.”

“They never do.”

She looks at me. “He used to talk, well, rant about you. About what you did to your dad, about the ranch, the house, this town dying. He said everything was your fault. And all I remember thinking was what it might be like to have that much power over someone. There were days that if I didn’t have Hannah, I’d have traded places with you in a heartbeat.”

I reach over and squeeze her hand. “I won’t tell you that you don’t know what you’re talking about because prison is prison. Nobody wants that. But I know what it’s like to be in your shoes, and I’d have chosen prison every time over the alternative.”

She squeezes my hand back before Jessica—David’s youngest sister—jumps to her feet and walks over.

“Can we play outside, Calliope?”

“Sure. We’ll come sit out on the deck and keep an eye on you, though.”

“I’m not a baby,” she huffs, all four-foot-two of sass aimed my way.

“I know, but I have a lot of plants and old buildings that attract all kinds of things like snakes and scorpions. I’d rather be there if you need me than in here, unable to hear you,” I explain.

She swallows, her eyes going wide at the mention of snakes. “Okay.”

I give her a wink before offering a hand to Dawn, who winces as I gently pull her to her feet.

“Snakes?”

“Well, there could be.” I smirk, making her chuckle.

“Smart move. I have a feeling that if we let them out of our sight for more than ten minutes, they’ll have plotted world domination.

“Gotta love women with ambition.”

She grins as we follow the girls out. We sit on the chairs while they chase each other around.

“I love how peaceful it is out here.”

“Yeah, me too. Though it’s been an adjustment since coming home.”

She’s quiet for a moment as she watches the girls play before she turns to look at me. “The day you smelled gasoline on me?—”

“It’s okay.”

“It’s not. I was getting ready to come over when he found me and told me he wanted me to drive him this way. Told me to say I wanted a face cream or something. I thought for a minute he knew, but it was really just a random coincidence. I went along with it because if someone saw me out here and told him, it would give me a good excuse, you know?”