“Jessica and I had an argument about her spending habits.” He could still hear her voice. Fuck you and your fifty bucks, she’d said, when he had complained that she’d bought another pair of shoes, pushing their credit card over its limit. “Sometimes when we fought, she’d leave and go out with her friends. Spending lots of money, getting drunk, and flirting with guys was her way of getting back at me, her way to get me jealous and piss me off. It always worked.”

Damien dug his fingernails into his legs. He never said these words out loud. It hurt to do it now, it ripped and clawed and shredded at him, but if he wanted to make Mandy understand why he wasn’t lovable, he had to tell her the truth about him. “It wasn’t a healthy way to deal with her anger, I guess, but then neither were the bribes and begging that I alternately used to try and get her to see my side of things. I think we both wanted the other to be something we just weren’t. But anyway, she took off that night, and while I was mad, I wasn’t surprised. Later her friends said when they left the club they’d gone to, Jessica had refused to go with them. They went on to the next party place and left her there.”

Mandy’s hand closed over his, forcing his grip on his pants to relax.

“It wasn’t the first time she’d stayed out all night, but in the morning I asked around and no one knew where she was. I called the cops right around the same time a restaurant owner was throwing his trash out in the alley and found her body. She’d been raped and strangled.”

The words meant nothing, could never convey anything as horrible as the sight of his dead wife that had greeted him in the morgue. The crime scene photos had cemented the knowledge that Jessica had suffered tremendously and had sent him retreating in his head to the safety of logic. Cold, hard survival. Never emotion. He had shut all that down like a pool at the end of a summer season to protect himself.

“Oh, dear God.”

Tears rolled down Mandy’s face, and her fingers jerked on his. Even in the dark, he could see the shock in her eyes, the horror. The pity.

“Damien, I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine what you’ve suffered.”

“I don’t want you to know!” he said, voice shaking. Biting the inside of his cheek and hardening his hand into a fist, he tried to regain control of himself. “I don’t want you to see the dark places I’ve been, I don’t want to expose you to that. I don’t want to hurt you or your daughter. I want you safe. I want you happy.”