“I’m ready,” Bay whispered as she walked into the hallway where Sydney was pacing.

Sydney went to her knees and hugged her daughter. She was five already, old enough to realize what was going on in her house. Sydney tried to keep David from having any sort of influence on Bay, and by unspoken agreement he didn’t hurt Bay as long as Sydney did what he said. But it was a terrible example Sydney was setting. Bascom, for all its faults, was safe, and going back to a place she despised was worth Bay finally knowing what security felt like.

Sydney pulled back before she started crying again. “Come on, honey.”

She used to be good at leaving. She used to do it all the time before she met David. Now the fear of it was making it hard to breathe.

When she first left North Carolina, Sydney had gone straight to New York, where she could blend and no one thought she was strange, where the name Waverley meant nothing. She moved in with some actors, who used her to perfect their Southern accents while she worked on getting rid of hers. After a year she went to Chicago with a man who stole cars for a living, a good living. When he was caught, she took his money and moved to San Francisco and lived on it for another year. She changed her name then, so he wouldn’t find her, and she became Cindy Watkins, the name of one of her old friends from New York. After the money was gone, she went to Vegas and served drinks. The girl she’d traveled from Vegas to Seattle with had a friend who worked at a restaurant called David’s on the Bay, and she got jobs for them both.

Sydney had been wildly attracted to David, the owner. He wasn’t handsome, but he was powerful and she liked that. Powerful men were thrilling, until the point that they turned frightening, and that was when she always left. She became so good at touching fire and not getting burned. Things with David started to get scary about six months after she started seeing him. He would bruise her sometimes, tie her up in bed and tell her how much he loved her. Then he started following her to the grocery store and to friends’ houses. She made plans to leave him, to steal some money from his restaurant and go to Mexico with a girl she’d met at the Laundromat, but then she found out she was pregnant.

Bay arrived seven months later, named by David after his restaurant. The first year of Bay’s life, Sydney resented the quiet baby for everything that had gone wrong. David disgusted her now, frightened her well beyond the limit she thought there was to being scared. And he sensed it and hit her more. This hadn’t been part of her plan. She didn’t want a family. She’d never counted on staying with any of the men she met. Now she had to stay because of Bay.