Jan did as she was told, something she was particularly good at. She ate a cracker with a slice of cheese and waited for her stomach to reject it. But instead the food made her hungrier. She took a second, then a sip of the wine.
“I only poured you a little,” Taylor said. “On an empty stomach it’s twice as powerful. But let me know if you’d like more.”
“Less is better, I think.”
“If I were you right now, I would need to relax, and maybe a little wine will help.”
“It’s hard. For months I’ve been gearing up to go one place, and now I’m in another. I never intended to come to Asheville at all. It seemed too dangerous. But after the fire? I just knew Harmony would find out somehow, and she would be sure I was dead. I couldn’t let that happen.”
“I’m so glad you came.”
Jan still wasn’t sure. All this well-meant reassurance didn’t take into account the will or the whims of the man she had been married to.
“Did you have a place to go?” Taylor asked. “I mean a house, a job, a life somewhere else?”
“We were working on it. Then Rex didn’t come home from work, and I knew I had to leave right away while I had that chance.”
“But you were able to get things in place quickly.”
Jan wanted to tell Taylor more, but sharing her life, even a little piece of it, was a luxury she hadn’t experienced in years.
“Not quickly,” she said. “Last New Year’s I met a woman at a party. I didn’t go to many parties, but this one was, well, it was required for my husband’s job, so I had to go along and look happy.”
“I’m guessing over the years you’ve learned to be a good actress.” Taylor set a salad on the counter and turned to do something at the stove.
“I like to cook,” Jan said, while she decided how to respond to that. “I could cook for you while I’m here, take some of that off your shoulders, anyway.”
“Great. We’ll work that out.”
Jan took another sip to steady herself. “At that party? There was a woman who knew my husband. I’d met her a couple of times over the years. She got me off to one side when he was talking business with some men. And she said she worried about the way he treated me. She told me to call her if I needed help, that she was part of a group of women who helped other women who had trouble at home.”
“How did she know that just from seeing you at a party?”
“Later she told me her first husband nearly killed her before she got out of the marriage. She recognized a fellow sufferer from the fear in my eyes. And she knew Rex well enough to suspect he could be mean.”
Taylor whistled softly. “It was that obvious?”
“I had bruises on my wrist. She paid attention. And she said I needed to get out while I still could.”
“You said she was part of a group of women who do this?”
“More like a network all over the country.” Jan hesitated, but there was no reason to do so. Taylor wasn’t going to turn anybody in. “Lady truckers. They call themselves Moving On. My husband sells insurance for trucks, and that’s why we were all at that party together.”
“That’s rich. Who better?”
“I called her two weeks later. One morning she waited until Rex left for the office. Then she came into our place the back way. We talked for an hour. She told me what they did and how successful they were. It’s been going on for years. Sometimes women go back to the men who beat them, because they can’t adjust, but nobody who stayed away has ever been found. I’ve wanted to get away for years, but...” It was too difficult to explain. She shrugged. “Anyway, I wanted to leave sooner, but Rex was watching me.”
“I’m not a counselor, just a friend, and a new one. I think it’s going to be difficult to put all that behind you. It’s going to take years. But you said something earlier that I want to put out on the table. You said you weren’t going to bore me with stories of your past?”
Jan realized she had done just that again. She didn’t know what to say, but Taylor went on.
“If we’re going to be friends, and I want to be, we’re going to have to bore each other with stories of the past. Because that’s what friends do. Only neither of us will be bored, Jan, because friends are interested in each other. I know you’ve been through hell, and whenever it’s helpful to talk about it, I’ll be happy to listen. I probably won’t have any answers, but that’s okay, too.”
“Do you have stories you’ll share?”
“I could spend hours just telling you about my mom and me, and all the years I kept her away. And about getting pregnant at seventeen and holding a grudge against Maddie’s father most of her life. I’m light-years from perfect, so with that out on the table, we can just find our way together, okay?”
Jan felt tears glaze her eyes, but she smiled. “Friends,” she said.
“Good. Now let’s talk about something that’s also important.” Taylor smiled, too. “What we’re going to put on our pasta tonight.”
Harmony’s mother had been living at Taylor’s house for three days. Harmony still couldn’t quite believe it. Using Rilla’s cell phone, she had spoken to her mother twice. In the unlikely event the Reynolds’ landline was being monitored, they had all agreed that Harmony would use Rilla’s cell and Jan would use Taylor’s for extra security.
Jan.
She still couldn’t get used to her mother’s new name. Janine Stoddard was Jan Seaton now, and while the Jan made sense and might even be risky, Seaton had been picked out of thin air. Moving On had found it was easier for women to remember their new names if their initials stayed the same. That might be risky, too, but not as risky as a woman forgetting what she called herself these days.
The name change wasn’t official, of course. Jan had no ID that said Seaton, but she also had no intention of needing ID.
Harmony had tried to fill her days with work and Lottie, but her mind was focused on the extraordinary turn of events that had brought her mother to Asheville. The Topeka paper had moved on to other stories, so news was difficult to come by, but she knew from the last conversation she’d had with her mother that her father still hadn’t been sighted. His disappearance was perplexing, even worrisome, since no one could monitor his movements. Was he searching for both of them, following the trail Moving On had so carefully laid to the West? Was he following the real trail to North Carolina, so that one day soon he could show up on Harmony’s doorstep?
Neither seemed particularly likely, and that was the worst of it. After years away from home, trying to think like her father brought back a childhood in which she’d tried to anticipate his every move and mood. She had hoped those days were gone forever. She never wanted to give him that much thought again.
