“His father worked in a coal mine. He was a lot like mine, big and overbearing, except he was also oppressively religious, and he never let a moment go by without pointing out our sin. Todd never tried to be intimate with me while I was pregnant because, according to his father, a woman’s body is sacred, particularly when she’s been chosen as a vessel for the Lord’s holy gift. And then I had a late miscarriage at nineteen weeks, and things went downhill from there.”

“Nineteen weeks?”

Della rubbed her nose against the scratchy growth of Tucker’s whiskers, touched by the concern in his voice. “Yep. I was in the hospital for two days, and all I wanted was to get back to Todd. Only…he was different. A stranger, almost. I think his father spent those two days pumping his head full of fire and brimstone and a whole lot of guilt.

The change in the boy she’d married had been bewildering.

“Todd was convinced the miscarriage was our punishment for succumbing to sins of the flesh. He didn’t comfort me. He barely talked to me. He went to work with his father every day and left me home alone too grief-stricken to do anything but stare at the walls most days. I made their meals, I did their washing, and kept the house tidy, but mostly, I was invisible. Todd certainly didn’t touch me anymore. In fact, he moved out of our bedroom. Until one night about four months later, I woke to…”

The memory flashed on her inward eye, and it took all of Della’s willpower not to flinch. The roil in her gut was as potent now as it had been then. Tucker’s hand slid around her shoulder. “You don’t have to go into the details.”

Della shook her head. She’d come this far. “His hand was at my throat,” she continued. “He was straddling my chest, pinning me to the bed with his body. His…penis was pushing into my mouth.”

She shuddered, suppressing the urge to gag. “I tried to scream and thrash, but I couldn’t shift him, and I could barely breathe. He kept saying it was all my fault for tempting him. That sex was bad, that it had made him a sinner, and that God had punished him by killing our child and now he had to punish me.”

“By abusing you?” Tucker demanded, disgust in his voice, his hand tightening on her shoulder. Della could feel the tempo of his heartbeat pick up. “Isn’t that a sin also?”

She stared at a point on the wall as those days closed in. “It was divine punishment, as far as he was concerned. And as long as he wasn’t having the traditional Biblical interpretation of sex, he could justify it.”

“Fucking…bastard.”