Page 56 of Never Alone
The reality was different.
She didn't have to give me more than that. I lived in the apartment with the rest.
Noah said sorry for the smallest things. The noise a fork made on a plate. The screw he dropped on the kitchen floor at the house last weekend—three sorries before it stopped rolling. I had to tell him a thing was fixable twice before he heard me. Three times when he was tired.
Tessa flinched at loud noises. She made herself smaller in rooms where she was already small.
The Natalie I knew at sixteen wasn't small.
She talked too much. She laughed at things that didn't deserve a laugh. She was annoyingly happy in a way I didn't have the patience for. The kind of girl who walked into a room and the room turned to her without anyone meaning to. She got the boy she wanted because she always got the boy she wanted. That was how she'd ended up with Ryan.
Now, Natalie was unrecognizable. She didn't even want to go by her real name. That was how much he'd hurt her.
"My client and her son have lived in this state for eight months, Your Honor."
Miranda's voice pulled me back to the room. She was on her feet, folder open on the table beside her, hands clasped at her waist, the way she stood when she was building.
"Rent records from the previous landlord at the Westbrook address, seven months continuous, ending when the property suffered fire damage. The current lease at the new address, in both my client's and Lieutenant Weston's names, was signedbefore the petition was filed. Bakery payroll, eight months continuous. Pediatric records at Lowcountry Family Medicine. Enrollment at Palmetto Creek Elementary."
She wasn't dramatizing. She was handing it to the judge in the order his pen could keep up with.
"Eight months on every line that matters, Your Honor. Six months meets the threshold. South Carolina is Noah St. George's home state under the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act."
She turned a page in the folder she didn't need to turn. The judge was writing. She moved to the next piece.
"Your Honor, before I continue, I want to address something opposing counsel will raise."
The judge looked up.
"Public records show that my client and Lieutenant Weston knew each other in 2007. When my client was sixteen years old."
Tessa went rigid beside me. I felt it before I saw it—her arm against mine going tight, the fist forming in her lap. She kept her chin level, her face composed. The body underneath the composure was telling a different story than the face.
I didn't move.
Miranda had said don't hand them anything, and whatever I gave the judge, he'd make a note of. I kept my eyes on the judge.
"My client didn't flee to a stranger, Your Honor. She fled to the one city in her life where a man had ever tried to protect her from an abuser. At sixteen, Lieutenant Weston reported her boyfriend's abuse. That boyfriend was convicted and went to prison. My client married a man who replicated that exact pattern. Eighteen years later, she returned to Havensworth."
She let the sentence sit before going on.
"This is not a sham engagement. It's an eighteen-year lesson my client finally learned."
The judge leaned forward. It was the first time he'd moved all morning.
Miranda took a breath, then went on.
"Your Honor, we have reason to believe records were buried in the home state. We are requesting a forensic audit. We are also requesting the appointment of a Guardian ad Litem. We are asking that the protective order be upheld and that visitation be supervised pending the audit and GAL report."
She sat.
Their lawyer was on his feet before she'd finished settling—senior-partner type, gray at the temples, in a suit that cost more than Nicholas's. The kind of man who'd made his career telling judges that other men's wives were unwell.
He led with the kidnapping. He didn't use the word, but he didn't have to. He laid the timeline out—Tessa leaving the home state with Noah, without notice, without consultation, without communication for seven months—in a register clean enough that the word arrived in the judge's head without him having to put it there.
He went on through the rest. Jurisdiction belonged to the home state, and the court should transfer. The protective order had to be vacated; the claims were unsubstantiated, and there was no documented history of abuse on file.
Then he arrived at the engagement.
