Cleaning.

Yeah, cleaning would burn some energy and kill some time while she waited for Renee’s call.

Erin opened the cupboard under the sink to grab a few supplies. But seeing the mess that had started to accumulate in the small space, she decided to pull everything out and scrub that surface first.

She turned on a satellite radio station in hopes of distraction. Once everything was relocated on the kitchen floor, Erin filled the sink with hot water and proceeded to scrub the inside of the cabinet while concentrating on the words to the song playing on the radio. So when her phone rang, she jumped up, catching the back of her head on the bottom of the sink. For a second she saw stars, followed by a wave of nausea. She’d hit her scar, the one hidden by her hair but had yet to flatten out and not catch on her brush every day.

Her phone rang a second time and she used more caution climbing out from under the sink. “Hello?” She didn’t take the time to look at who the caller was. She had one hand on the phone and the other one reaching to the back of her head.

“It’s me.” It was Renee. She sounded off.

Erin sat with her back resting on the cabinets.

“It’s not good, is it?”

“There’s lots to talk about, but I want to know how you liked the butter cookie recipe I sent you.”

Their code. “It was great.”

“Are you sitting down?”

Erin looked at the floor around her. “Yeah.”

“The judge lifted the protection order. I’m sorry.”

Air caught in the back of her throat. “I guess we knew that was coming.”

“I tried. Desmond’s arrogance was in his eyes, but I think he’s been taking acting lessons.”

Did she really want to hear this? Much as she wanted to just hang up and put this past her, Erin knew she had to collect all the knowledge she could on her husband’s actions in order to stay one step ahead of him. Or twenty, if that was possible.

“What happened?”

Renee sighed. “He stood beside his attorney and let him do most of the talking. I honestly didn’t think he was going to talk on his own behalf, but then he asked to be sworn in. He gave quite a performance. He stood in front of that judge and told him the reason you’d asked for the order was prompted by the results of your head injury after the accident. His attorney asked about the physician documentation about your amnesia right after you were taken to the hospital. He went on to plea that once you started to recover, it was obvious that your memory didn’t completely return.”

“So he repeated everything he did the first time.”

“Yeah, only this time he managed to bring up tears for the judge. Said that he loved you dearly and couldn’t bear the thought that you were out in the world alone thinking he’d tried to harm you. Said you needed psychological help. It took everything in me not to laugh.”

Erin could actually picture Desmond’s pretend tears that went along with his bullshit story. She’d seen it many times while he stood beside her in emergency rooms and clinics.

“What happened next?”

“I countered, of course. Asked him to explain the multitude of injury reports from the past. He kept the same story only this time said several doctors had suggested that mental illness might have played a role. I objected. He then talked about the medication you took after each trip to the hospital. Since that was in the original documentation, I couldn’t object. He said that every time you hurt yourself the doctors gave you more painkillers—”

“I took only a fraction of those pills.”

“Nothing we can prove,” Renee told her.

Erin’s head started to really pound.

“He suggested Munchausen syndrome.”

“What the hell is that?” Erin cried.

“A condition where someone intentionally hurts themselves, or fakes illness, for the attention and medication.”

She wanted to throw up. “So now Desmond is a doctor?”

“Actually, there was one file where an ER doctor mentioned it in his documentation. I don’t think Desmond’s attorney caught it the first time.”

“So let me see if I have all this straight. I’m mentally ill, hurt myself for attention and drugs, and Desmond is the victim here.”

Renee released a long-suffering breath. “That’s the picture he painted.”

“This is ridiculous.”

“I’m sorry. For what it’s worth, I don’t think the judge bought everything he tried to sell. What the judge did do was look at the past year, saw there was no contact between you both and that the divorce should act as another means to stay away from each other. Since Desmond was never brought up on spousal abuse charges and lacked any police reports, he dismissed the protection order.”

She was quiet for several seconds.

“We knew this would eventually happen, Maci,” Renee said.

“I know.”

“You’re going to be all right.”

Erin felt the tears well behind her eyes. “Okay.” She was numb.

“I’m going to reach out to his attorney before I leave the office today and get a finger on the pulse of where we are in the divorce. My guess is I won’t hear anything until Monday.”

“Okay.”

“Try not to think about this. He doesn’t know where you are, and if he so much as peeked his head into your life, I would drag him back in front of this judge so fast he’d have whiplash.” Renee was trying to lighten the mood. But what she failed to understand was that if Desmond showed up in her life, she wouldn’t be around to press charges.

“Okay.”

“I’m calling you on Monday.”

Erin hung up and dropped her phone on the floor beside her. Her legs, which she’d curled up to her chest, fell in front of her and knocked down three of the bottles of cleaning supplies.

Slowly, the tears started to fall and her breathing increased to short, staccato pants. That son of a bitch. You always win.

“You always win,” she said out loud as she kicked one foot. Her toe caught a plastic cleaner bottle and sent it skidding across the kitchen.

She kicked a second bottle. “Asshole,” she yelled.

Her head was pounding, tears were streaming, and she yelled and kicked at the bottles until they were broken and spilling their contents all over the place.

“How dare you!”

Big blubbery sobs over the injustice of it all kept coming.

The pounding in her head became an actual noise that came from her front door.

“Erin?” It was Matt, and he was yelling her name. “Open the door.”

“I’m okay.” She looked at the mess she’d made and tried to get to her feet and instantly regretted it. Her heartbeat raced in her ears.

“Open the door, Erin.” He wiggled the lock, his voice frantic.

She slipped in the mess on the floor, caught her fall with her right hand, and pain spiked up her arm.

Matt started pounding again.

She forced herself off the floor and opened the door. Tension sat in his jawline, and his eyes were sharp as a bird of prey looking from above. “Jesus!” He pulled her to his side as he wrapped his gaze around the room. “Where is he?”

“What?”