Chapter 21: Taken Down

"Get away from my car," I said.

Gavin held up both hands, with a bunch of sunflowers still hanging from one of them.

"I just want to talk. Five minutes. You owe me five minutes, Lin. We had three years."

"The judge gave you five hundred feet."

"I'm not touching you."

"You're barely twenty feet away."

"I know what the judge said."

His eyes went to Tobias, and the smile slid off.

"This isn't about the judge. It's about us, and what he's doing to you."

Tobias had stopped beside me.

He didn't speak.

He stood there with his hands loose, and I felt him take in the whole lot with one look.

The security guard by the entrance.

The two nurses on a smoke break.

Marcy's yellow scrubs, at a fourth-floor window, with a phone pressed to her ear.

"He's using you," Gavin said. "He wants the baby. He's a Roswell."

His voice rose.

"They take what they want, Lin. I'm the only one who ever kept you safe."

"Kept me safe."

"I stepped in front of you. Every time."

He took a step toward me.

He was doing it again: the hand on my arm, and his body between me and everything else.

For three years that had been my favorite thing about him.

Now I saw it plainly.

It was a man blocking my view.

"You stepped in front of me so I'd never look past you," I said.

"That's not true."

"So I'd never see a door I could go through."

"Lin."

He lunged.

It was fast, and he got his fingers around my wrist, and the sunflowers hit the asphalt.

"You're coming with me," he said. "We'll talk in the car. That baby is mine."

I screamed.

It was a real scream, the kind that rises off a parking lot and doesn't stop.

Tobias's fist met Gavin's jaw before the echo came back.

Gavin dropped on his back on the asphalt.

"Don't," I said, because Tobias was pulling back his arm for a second one. "Don't. He's down."

"He touched you."

"I know. Let the police do it."

Behind us the security guard was running, and so were three people in scrubs.

I held up my phone.

I had pressed record at the first word, in my pocket, the way Marcy taught me.

"Sir, stay where you are," the guard shouted at Gavin.

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