Page 53 of Hunter or Hunted

Still, I did want to speak with her. Just not at this moment.

“Did you see a back door when we got in?” I asked Sebastian.

“In my peripheral when we were leaving this morning,” he said. “Circle around the block?”

“Please.”

We continued past the half-height wrought-iron gate in front of the B&B. Sebastian gave my hand a squeeze. “But you were saying?”

“It was just…” Pressing my lips together, I blew a consoling breath from my nostrils. “Never in my life have I wanted to punch a woman so badly.”

Couldn’t call the sound that left him a laugh. Maybe closer to a snort.

A similar sound fell from my lips too. “Or maybe grab her and scream, ‘Why don’t you see what I see? Why don’t you understand?’”

His tone softened when he said, “About Delilah’s death?”

“Not really. I can understand that. It was out of character when she left a few months ago. They haven’t communicated since. I can see why she’d believe Delilah killed herself.” Eyes falling to the brick sidewalk below, that chill crept over my arms. Every hair on my arms stood upright. “It was everything else. She almost… defended Evan?” Those words tasted sour on my tongue. “Charlotte didn’t just excuse him. She defended him.”

“That’d explain why Delilah came to the ranch,” he said.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “But it doesn’t make sense to me. Sure, Charlotte cares about Evan. She’s friends with his parents, all the kids grew up together, whatever. But why the hell would she just write off him abusing her daughter as a nonissue? Even from an evolutionary standpoint, it doesn’t make sense. It’s in the nature of every animal on the planet to protect our young.”

“We’re communal creatures though.” Sebastian gazed ahead as we walked, tone somewhere between flat and intrigued. Not like he’d burst at the seams with excitement, but like the philosophy of this discussion tickled his brain. “Nature versus nurture and all that. We live in a patriarchal system that ostracizes women without a second thought and always gives men the benefit of the doubt.”

I slowed my pace and gave him a once-over.

Catching on, Sebastian arched a brow at me. “Do you disagree?”

“No.” I stopped and turned to look at him head-on. “It just sounds like you’ve given this a lot of thought.”

“I have.” He shrugged and veered right, down the brick alleyway. “My mom acted the same way about Jason. Almost everyone did, man or woman. It was always, ‘Relationships are complicated,’ or ‘It’s complex.’ And it is complex, but abusive relationships aren’t. They’re simple. The complex part is the way society reacts to them. The dismissing, the minimizing. If people actually saw it happening, if they watched the fight in real time, start to finish, they’d always defend the victim. Unless they’re abusers themselves.”

Nothing I could argue with there either. While in my marriage, I’d regurgitated that line more times than I could count. It’s complicated.

But it never had been. Not really.

The simple reality, the one I’d ignored for a decade, was that Troy was a shitty person. He just did a beautiful job convincing me, and everyone else, that he wasn’t.

Sebastian paused on the sidewalk. The rear door to the bed-and-breakfast was within sight now, perched beyond the wooden railing of the wraparound porch. “Can I ask you something?”

“Shoot,” I said.

“What’d your mom think of your ex?” he asked.

My stomach rumbled. I prayed he wasn’t going where I thought he was with this. “She loved him. But she didn’t know everything.”

“What did she know?” Curiosity shone in his hazel eyes. Not judgment, but curiosity. I could handle curiosity. “If you don’t mind me asking. We don’t have to get into this if you don’t want to.”

“No, it’s alright.” I cleared my throat and raised a shoulder. “I don’t know. When I caught him texting another girl for the first time, I told her about it. A few other times too, with different things. Cheating and shit like that. But I never told her about the violence.”

Just the thought of telling my mom about that, even as I mentioned it now to Sebastian, made my skin quiver and crawl. The embarrassment of acknowledging I’d allowed that kind of treatment, that I’d lived with it as long as I had, was almost as unbearable as the behavior itself.

“What’d she say?” he asked. “Like, did it change her opinion of him?”

The crawling quiver over my arms intensified. He sounded all too much like Rhiannon.

I picked up my pace and flicked open the lock on the wrought-iron gate. “Usually something along the lines of, ‘That’s men for you.’”