Loving Him Was My Punishment novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Six Steps

On the landing, in front of the neighbours, Hazel refuses the doctor, Padraig sends the men away from six steps below, and she takes the key to his empty house, where a photograph of her laughing waits in the hall.

"Hazel, open the door," Marguerite called through it. "It's cold out here."

Finbar put his back against the wood and shook his head at me.

Across the landing, a door opened a crack, and a woman in a bathrobe looked out at the small crowd outside our flat.

Marguerite saw her too, and lowered her voice to a murmur that carried perfectly.

"She's been very unwell. The doctor only needs a few minutes."

I stood up from the bed.

My legs felt heavy, but they were mine.

Finbar said, "Don't."

"If I stay in here, she tells everyone I wouldn't come out," I said. "Open it."

He moved aside.

I slid the chain across and opened the door as far as it would go.

Marguerite stood in the gap, pearls at her throat, her eyes bright with worry.

"Oh, darling, look at you. You haven't slept."

"What's the doctor for?" I asked.

The man in the grey overcoat stepped forward and smiled.

"Miss Corrigan, I'm only here to assess whether you're a danger to yourself. It's a short form."

"Who are you?"

"I'm with the Brightwater group's Boston office."

My stomach tightened at the name.

"Show me the form," I said.

He looked at Marguerite.

The two men behind him shifted their weight, and I saw that one had a coil of soft white straps hanging from his belt.

I knew those straps.

I could not have said how. My wrist knew them before I did, and the scar on it burned.

"You see?" Marguerite said gently, for the woman in the bathrobe. "She's frightened. This is exactly what we spoke about."

A teenage boy came out of the flat below with his phone held up and began to film.

The doctor reached for my arm.

"Miss Corrigan, please step out."

"No," I said.

I said it loudly, to the boy with the phone and the woman in the robe.

"My name is Hazel Corrigan. I'm twenty-five. I'm not going anywhere with these men."

"Hazel," Marguerite said, and the sweetness thinned.

Then footsteps came fast up the stairwell, and everyone on the landing turned toward them.

He stopped below us, on the sixth step from the top.

I know it was the sixth because I counted afterward, over and over, trying to understand why he had stopped exactly there.

He wore the same black overcoat as the night before.

My hands went cold. The corridor tilted.

I looked at the only part of him I could manage, which was his hands.

They were at his sides, open, and they were not moving.

"I called the police at six," Padraig Ellsworth said to the doctor. His voice was low and level. "There was a van with no plates outside this building. Two officers are in the lobby. They'd like to see your license to practice in Maine."

The doctor's smile slipped.

"This is a family matter, Mr. Ellsworth."

"Then you'll have no trouble explaining it to them."

The two men in dark jackets looked at each other.

One of them went down the stairs quickly, and the other followed him.

The doctor lifted his bag and said, "I'll be in touch, Mrs. Corrigan," and squeezed past the boy with the phone.

Marguerite did not leave.

She turned to the man on the sixth step with her face full of grief.

"Look what you've done to her," she said. "She can't even stand to be near you. Stay away from my daughter."

"I'm leaving as soon as she says to," he answered, and for the first time his voice was not level.

My body made the decision for me.

I leaned over the railing and was sick on the landing, hard, with nothing in me but coffee and fear.

Finbar caught me by the shoulders.

When I could look up, Padraig was exactly where he had been.

He had not come one step closer.

His hands were still open at his sides, and he had gone white around the mouth.

"I'll go," he said. "Tell me and I'll go."

"Stay there," I said. My voice scraped. "Don't come up."

"I won't."

"Did you hound me?" I asked.

"I followed you from the party, and I waited outside last night," he said. "I should have asked first."

That was a straight answer to a hard question.

"Please go," I told Marguerite.

She stared at me for a long moment, then went down the stairs past him without turning her head.

The boy lowered his phone.

"I need somewhere she can't walk into," I said. I did not say it to anyone in particular.

Padraig reached into his pocket slowly, so that I could see every movement.

He held out a brass key on a plain ring.

"There's a house on Pell Street," he said. "It's empty. Nobody has a key but me, and I'll give you mine. I won't come inside unless you ask."

I held out my palm.

He climbed no higher.

He stretched his arm out as far as it would reach, and opened his hand a foot above mine, and let the key drop.

It landed cold in my palm, and our fingers did not touch.

Finbar drove me there an hour later.

The row house had a green door and a hall that smelled of cold plaster.

On a shelf by the stairs stood one framed photograph.

It was me, at nineteen, on the boat club dock with wind in my hair.

I was laughing at whoever held the camera.

I had never seen that picture, and I did not remember anyone making me laugh like that.

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