She chuffed and shook her head. “Quit being so nice. You should be cheering for me to jump after everything I did to you.”
“What are you talking about? I would never want anything to happen to you.”
She laughed, loud and rich, but almost immediately, she dissolved into tears. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”
Panic exploded inside me. I knew exactly what those words meant. “No. No. Please don’t say that. Jenna, look at me. Look at me.” I glanced around the empty terrace. A whole party was celebrating below us, yet we were completely alone. Bowen would come looking for me eventually. I just had to keep her talking until somebody else showed up. Maybe they could distract her and I could drag her back over the railing or, or…
Fuck, I didn’t know.
She was only a few feet away, just out of arm’s reach, but I didn’t dare try to grab her again. Lifting my shaking hands in prayer, I touched my fingertips to my chin. “Tell me what you think you did. Let’s talk about it. Put it to rest and then we can go back inside and enjoy the rest of the party.”
“I’m so sorry,” she choked out. “I could have stopped him. I should have stopped him.” She swayed from side to side, her fingers slipping on the metal bar at the top of the railing.
“Who?” I questioned urgently. Time was more of the essence than ever. One gust of wind and she would be gone.
“Mark.”
Instinctively, I flinched at the mention of his name, but it was the crushing reality of it coming from her mouth that felt like a knock-out punch.
“What?” I breathed, a wave of dizziness washing over me.
“I thought he loved me. It didn’t matter that he swore me to secrecy about our relationship while we were at work. Or that the majority of our dates were in the front seat of his truck. He loved me. I was sure of it.” A bitter scoff escaped her lips. “That’s when the abuse started. When he was sure I was in love with him.” The lights on the terrace were dim, but glistening twin rivers dripped off her chin. “We fought a lot. I wanted more, a real relationship. He just wanted to fuck. It turned physical, but he would always apologize, buy me something nice, and then compliment the way I sucked his dick.” She laughed sadly. “That’s love, right? How romantic.”
My stomach rolled as I stared at her. Nothing made sense. She hadn’t been a part of my life in Atlanta. We’d met in Savannah, hours and hundreds of miles away.
But she had known Mark.
Which made her coincidentally moving in next door to me all the less plausible.
“How did you find me?”
Her lips curled, not quite a smile, not quite a grimace. “Which time?”
Those two words seemed to haunt me. First, with Mark. Now, Jenna.
Fuck.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
“Oh, Jenna. Please tell me you didn’t help him.”
“No!” she exclaimed, readjusting her grip. “But I didn’t stop him, either. I was scared, Remi. You have to believe me. I didn’t know what to do.” Desperation coated every word as she hurriedly explained, “The day I found you, I was bringing him lunch. We’d gotten into a big fight the night before and I thought he was stressed trying to clean out the old brewery for the new Rusty Nail, so I wanted to offer my help. But he wasn’t there. You were.”
My stomach clenched, the champagne threatening to make a reappearance as I tried unsuccessfully to wrap my mind around what I was hearing.
She continued. “You were all drugged up and cuffed to the wall. I recognized you from pictures in his office. It terrified me because if he’d done that to his friend, I couldn’t imagine what he’d do to me. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind he would have killed me if I’d told anyone. I left you there, desperate to convince myself there was nothing I could’ve done, but I was riddled with guilt that he was going to kill you if I didn’t find a way to stop him. So I snuck back over there every day when I was sure he was at the main bar. I tried to break you out of the chains, but nothing worked. If you were gone, he couldn’t very well blame it on me. But he kept you so drugged up that I couldn’t even get you to drink water. Most of the time, I just sat and cried with you.”
I sucked in a sharp breath and a shiver that had nothing to do with the cool night air rolled down my spine. “You were the crying woman.”
Her forehead wrinkled. “You remember that?”
Hot tears streaked my cheeks. “I did. I don’t anymore. But after he let me go, Bowen said I became obsessed with…her—this other woman. I was so hell-bent on saving her that I lost myself into a pit of despair.”
