Forever Hers by Walters, Ednah (top 50 books to read txt) 📕

Amy grimaced. “It now seems so juvenile.”

“No, it’s not. It gave me the idea to fake your death then have you reappear. Nolan thinks you’re dead. Rod and Hailey are going to make sure he takes his girlfriend out tonight, where you will appear. We want him to see you at the restaurant. What he does after that will be crucial, but we’ll be waiting for him.”

They were still discussing the details of their plan when the cabin attendant brought their lunch. Afterwards, Raelynn napped, leaving the two of them watching real-time surveillance of Nolan. He was piling camping things in his living room, which meant he planned to go to his cabin.

Seeing inside the same house she’d lived in brought back so many memories. Some bad, others good. After a while, she couldn’t stand it. “You’ve never asked me why I married him.”

Eddie glanced at her and shrugged. “It’s not important.”

That was sweet, but… “I’d like to explain anyway.”

Eddie closed the laptop and nodded. “Okay.”

“He was there for me the night Charles got killed.” She frowned, still finding it hard to believe Nolan was behind Charles’s death. “He was the first officer at the scene, which now made sense. He stayed with me at the hospital, until my parents arrived, and visited me at home when I convalesced. He continued to visit throughout my pregnancy. My parents liked him. All they saw…all I saw was this nice guy who also happened to be a cop. He never asked for anything, not even a date. He was just there. Supportive. Attentive. Nice. He swore to get the men responsible for killing Charles and he did. Raelynn was six months old when he asked me out and about a year when he asked me to marry him.”

“Were you in love with him?” Eddie asked.

Amy shook her head. “I was grateful to him and I thought I loved him, but I wasn’t in love with him. The passion wasn’t there. A couple years into our marriage, and it started to bother him. He became controlling, wanting to know where I was and what I was doing. He cut me off from the other officers’ wives, my friends, my parents, but behind my back, he told everyone I wasn’t well.” She talked about the Russian roulette game Nolan loved to play with his gun, the threats to kill himself or her if she ever left him, how powerless and helpless she’d felt.

“Did he ever touch Raelynn?” Eddie asked through clenched teeth.

“No. He’d wait until she was in bed before he acted out, but that changed when she turned four. He started dictating what she wore and which friends she played with. Children are very sensitive and Raelynn must have picked up the vibes around the house because she started having nightmares. She’d come to our bedroom in the middle of the night. I always took her back to her bed and stayed with her until she slept. Nolan started resenting her.”

Eddie murmured something ugly under his breath, his hand tightening around hers. She hadn’t even noticed he’d taken her hand in his. She slipped it from under his and placed it on her lap.

“The last straw was the night she came to our bedroom and he took her back to her bedroom. I didn’t hear her cry and was convinced he’d done something horrible. I waited until he was asleep then went to check on her.” The terror on her daughter’s face would stay with her forever. When Amy continued, her voice shook. “He’d tied her wrists to her bed, and covered her mouth with duct tape, so she wouldn’t call me. I just…I just grabbed her and ran.”

The silence that followed was deafening. She lifted her head and glanced at Eddie. His eyes were narrowed, his jaws tense and hand clenched. He looked ready to punch something.

“Where were your parents during all this time?” he ground out. “Why weren’t they helping you?”

Amy sighed. “Nolan had them believing all sorts of things about me. By the time I got around to visiting them, he had convinced them I was the one hurting Raelynn.”

Disbelief flashed across his face. “And they believed him?”

Amy shrugged. “Don’t judge them too harshly. I wasn’t exactly a dutiful daughter. By the time Charles died, we were hardly on speaking terms. They were relieved when I married Nolan. I couldn’t go back to them when it fell apart.”

Eddie scrubbed his face. “Kids act out all the time, Amy. It doesn’t mean you give up on them.”

Listening to him come to her defense made her feel warm and fuzzy inside, but the situation with her parents was partly her fault. It took her a long time to reach that conclusion.

“How could you forgive them?”

“They are Raelynn’s only grandparents. Charles was an orphan and came from the system, so if anything should ever happen to me, she’d…” Amy’s voice broke. She cleared it and continued. “She’d need them.”

“So they can treat her the way they treated you? Over my dead body.” He pushed the button for the cabin attendant and asked for a drink. Amy declined.

In the past weeks, she’d thought about everything that had happened before she packed up and left Charlottesville and reached the only conclusion—her parents really thought she was crazy.

“You know they had reasons to believe I was psychotic,” she said softly after the flight attendant brought Eddie his beer and left. “Remember the break-ins and calls to the police?”

“Do not make excuses for them,” Eddie ground out. “Parents are supposed to support their children no matter how often they screw up or if they are running up and down the street naked because of a psychotic breakdown. Family comes first, not ex-husbands.” Eddie chugged his drink. “How did you get Reither to sign your divorce papers?”

“I went to his station and caused a stink. He had no choice but to sign them.”

Eddie put the bottle on the table and scooted