Page 10 of Never Alone
She waited.
"It shouldn't be a problem," I said. "We just can't have that kind of attention right now."
Mrs. Thompson was the only person in Havensworth who knew the truth.
We'd come to Havensworth seven months back, Noah and I, running from Noah's father. I'd been planning the escape for longer than that—pulling together cash a little at a time, getting through the days, waiting for the day I had enough to run away. When I finally had enough, I packed a small bag for each of us, put Noah in a secondhand car I'd bought for cash, and drove for hours to a city where I could disappear.
I couldn't run to my parents. They loved Nicholas. They wouldn't have believed what I told them about him, and even if they had, his lawyers would have made the rest of the story disappear. So I picked Havensworth. I'd stayed here once as a teenager, less than a year—long enough ago that no one I'd known would remember me. And Nicholas didn't know I'd ever been here.
I was a military brat—I'd lived in too many places to count, and I'd never stayed in any of them long enough to miss them when we left. He couldn't have traced it. But I couldn't have told you why I picked this city specifically. Just that the night we ran, my hands turned the wheel toward Havensworth before my head did.
I'd told Mrs. Thompson the truth when she'd hired me. There was paperwork—there's always paperwork—and the paperwork required my legal name. Natalie St. George, née Shaw. Months later, when it came time to enroll Noah in school, I'd thought about getting him papers in another name. I didn't know anyone who could do that. And if I'd found someone and we'd been caught, that would have been worse than what we already had. So I'd given the school his real name, and put us both on the rolls, hoping the system was slow enough to buy us another year. Or two. Or whatever I could get.
I'd thought we had more time.
Some part of me had been surprised, in those first months, that a missing persons report on Noah hadn't been filed yet. I'd kept waiting for the call—a sheriff at the bakery, a school officer at Noah's classroom door, someone showing up to take us back to him. It hadn't come.
I knew why.
A year before I'd left, I'd filed a domestic violence complaint against Nicholas. I'd done it on a day when I'd been brave enough to do it and stupid enough to think the system wouldhelp. The complaint had been buried within a week. I had not seen the inside of a courtroom. The officers who took my report had been polite, and the report had quietly stopped existing. Nicholas had connections. He'd used them.
The silence after was the cleanest thing he had ever done to me.
But that buried complaint was still on a server somewhere. If Nicholas filed a missing persons, an investigator working the case would pull our family's contact history with law enforcement. The complaint would surface. The first question would stop beingwhere is the wife?and start beingwhat did the husband do to make her run?
Nicholas wouldn't survive that question publicly.
So he hadn't filed.
He was looking for me his own way, with his own people, and he was doing it quietly because that was the only way he could afford to do it at all.
Knowing that didn't help. He was still looking. And every paper trail I left lying around brought him closer.
On paperwork, I was Natalie. To everyone else, I was Tessa Marin. The new face went with the new name—different hair, different eyes, glasses I didn't actually need. Mrs. Thompson hadn't pushed when I'd asked her to call me Tessa. I'd told her that hearing my own name still hurt. She'd nodded once and never used Natalie. I'd asked the same of the front office at Noah's school. The forms said, Natalie St. George. The women who picked up the phone there had been calling me Ms. Marin since September.
She was quiet for a beat after I said it. Then she nodded, once.
"Honey, that's what I've been wanting to talk to you about."
I looked at her.
"I've been holding off because it wasn't my place, but I've been thinking about it for a while. And I think it's getting to be time."
I waited.
"You can't keep running for the rest of his childhood. You know that. You knew it before I said it. He's nine. He's going to be ten, and eleven, and a teenager. You're not going to be able to do this when he's a teenager. You're barely doing it now."
She wasn't unkind about it. She said it the way an older woman said hard things to a younger one she loved.
"And every month you're hiding is another month closer to him finding you. You said it yourself. He's looking. He's good at looking. Eventually, he's going to be good enough."
I didn't say anything.
"That report you filed against him? It's still there, sweetheart. But it's only useful if you use it. If you keep waiting, it stays a piece of paper somebody buried. If you put it in front of a judge, it becomes the thing that ends this for you."
I looked down at the inventory sheet.
"I think you have to face him, sweetheart. The proper way. With a lawyer who's better than his lawyer, a courtroom, and a piece of paper that tells him to stay away from you for the rest of his life. I think that's the only way a man like that ever lets go. The law has to make him."
