Chapter 1
She’s the first thing you see.
Huddled up in a chair with her head in her hands, she looks so fucking small and you find it so hard to believe that this woman is the reason that your husband is dead, that your children will have to grow up without a father. You can feel her anguish across the room, can just barely make out the blood stains on her white, floral dress and the nausea and the rage battle within you.
There’s a man with her — objectively good looking and seemingly disinterested and you know his type immediately. Rich, charming and smug; the douchebag trifecta. Your suspicion is confirmed when he rolls his eyes in the direction of the woman, muttering something quietly. And then her eyes are meeting yours, red rimmed and watery, and you wonder what it says about you, that you haven’t shed a tear since the officer first arrived at your front door.
You can read her pity from across the room and it only serves to fuel your rage. You remember this part well; how much you always fucking hated being on the receiving end of these sad, sympathetic looks. But it doesn’t last long, because the woman’s gaze shifts downwards, until it meets the brown mess of curls pressed against your hip and in an instant, she’s vomiting and it’s really gratifying, in some really fucked up way.
You’d never quite mastered the art of compartmentalizing. Even now, as an officer leads you into a room to go over some of Ted’s personal belongings, you can feel the rage simmering beneath the surface. In a lot of ways, you’re still grieving a twenty year old loss — still a scared, angsty teenager with too many emotions that have nowhere to go. You wear your anger like a second skin — it’s interwoven into the very fabric of your being. It’s in everything you do and you feel robbed of the other stages of grief, skipping denial and going straight into your most comforting emotion.
It’s about fifty shades of fucked up, but you almost feel as if Ted is mocking you from the afterlife. It’s so fucking typical for him to take the easy way out — not bothering to stay and fight for his family or the marriage he had single-handedly destroyed. (And, okay, maybe it wasn’t exactly single-handedly, and maybe your heart hadn’t been in it for a while and maybe you shouldn’t have put your hands on him. But you weren’t the one who had been fucking someone barely older than your son while unashamedly feeding into your spouse’s insecurities.)
The detective questions Ted’s choice of running apparel — vans and a pair of jeans, and the anger swells and the defenses build and you’re not exactly going to tell them that you he’d probably been waiting for his barely legal girlfriend to come pick his pathetic ass up when the car struck him. And so you do what you do best. You deflect. You stare out into the open bullpen — at the pretty woman with the haunted eyes and the blood soaked dress that you can’t seem to take your eyes off of.
“Couldn’t you at least get her to change into something that isn’t covered in my husband’s fucking blood?”
“It’s not your husband’s blood, Mrs. Harding.”
Your gaze catches the other woman’s eye and your blood runs cold as her hand presses against her stomach. There’s a gnawing in your gut — a little itch inside you brain that tells you there’s an important piece to the puzzle you’re missing here. But then she’s walking out the door and Henry is stirring in your lap and the moment is lost.
x
The next time you see her, it’s outside of the station, her arm locked in what appears to be a bruising group. Judy, the man calls her on one breath, fucking idiot on the next.
Henry is passed out in your arms, head heavy on your shoulder and the back pain you’re sure to feel tomorrow is the least of your worries — second only to the domestic violence you’re the unwilling witness of. And she doesn’t deserve your defense, this woman that essentially murdered your husband, but you’re so sick of men like this; men that get off on abuse and infidelity. And so when he raises his hand to her, you can’t help yourself.
“Dude,” you grit out in a harsh whisper, “in front of a fucking police station? Really? Pretty ballsy.”
The laughter that the man emits when he tells you to mind your own fucking business is one of a man who truly has never known the meaning of consequence.
“Gladly,” you mutter, studiously avoiding the anguished gaze of the other woman — Judy, your brain supplies. “But there’s about a dozen fucking cops right inside that’ll be happy to make it their business.”
“It’s okay,” you hear, the voice raspy and broken and full of emotion. “I’m— we’re okay.” And you try not to read too much into it when she tacks on an impassioned and sincere “thank you”.
x
The drive home is slow and nerve wracking, your hands shaking around each and every bend, and there’s something about that last interaction that continues to nag at you — something that you don’t realize until you’re in your foyer being assaulted by the last memories of seeing your husband alive; of your fist flying at his face.
Judy didn’t flinch.