Page 43 of Never Alone
She was sitting forward in the chair with her hands folded in her lap. She was making herself smaller in increments I wouldn't have caught a week ago. Shoulders rounding. Chin lower. Her hands folded tighter.
I stopped shaking my head.
She'd held a glass of water like that, the day she'd come to the firehouse. Both hands. Sitting on the curb outside the bay door, her face still wet, the handkerchief I'd given her in her lap. She'd thrown up before she'd gotten to the truth. The asking had been enough.
Noah is the only thing I have, and I have to try everything I can for him. Even this.
I sighed.
I didn't have to want to do it. It was the right thing. That made it worth doing.
"Update on the protective order before we go on.”
She didn't pick up the pen.
“The ex parte was granted.”
Tessa's head came up.
"He doesn't know," Miranda said. "That's how ex parte works. The judge issued the order on our motion, without notice to him. It restrains him from contacting either of you, Noah's school, your workplace, or any address associated with you. Itwill be served on him alongside the petition, at his home, within the week."
"What happens when he's served?"
"He gets fourteen days to file his response. There's a follow-up hearing inside two weeks—both parties present—where his lawyer will move to vacate the order. We hold the line. But for the next several days, you have the order in your hand, and he doesn't know it exists. It documents him as restrained from the moment we filed. Anything he does between now and the hearing becomes a violation of an order he didn't know about, but is bound by. He's a lawyer. He knows how it works. The minute he's served, he stops moving in the open. Until then, we have a window, and we use it."
"Okay."
Tessa's voice came out flat. Relief, but not the kind that had anywhere to land yet.
"After he's served," Miranda continued, "his team is going to dig. Into Tessa. Into her history, her old addresses, anyone she knew before she got here. They'll be fast, and they'll be thorough. Anything they can use to argue she's unstable, that she fled without cause, that this case is exaggerated—they'll use. Assume they find every paper trail there is to find. We plan around that."
I waited a beat. Then I said it.
"There's a 2007 police report I want to ask you about. I made it. Tessa's boyfriend at the time—he went to prison. I'd assume Nicholas's team is going to find it. I want to know how it plays in court."
Miranda set the pen down. She had not picked the pen up. The not-picking-up was the same as setting-down with this woman.
"There's a 2007 police report?" She looked at Tessa. Then back to me. "You knew each other in 2007?"
I looked at Tessa.
She hadn't told her this. I had assumed she had. I'd been wrong.
She told her now. She gave her the short version. The bones of it. Her family had lived in Havensworth for a few months when she was sixteen. She and I had gone to the same school. The boy she'd been seeing was older and abusive. I'd reported him. He'd gone to jail. Her father had moved them out of state inside a week. She had not lived here since, until last year.
She told it without crying. Her hands moved once in her lap and went still.
Miranda took it in. Did not write anything down.
"That's why you came back here," she said.
"I didn't think anyone would still be here. I was wrong."
Miranda absorbed it for a beat. Then she turned back to me.
"And the report. Filed under your name?"
"Yeah. Anonymously wouldn't have done it. I had to give a statement."
