He Hits You? Suck It Up So I Locked Them in With My Abusive Husband novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: I Decide

The officer set the glass down on the blotter very gently.

"Mr. Slocumb," he said. "Stand up for me."

Conway did not stand.

He looked at the glass, then at his mother, then at me.

The soft, sorry look was gone from his face.

"It's tea," he said. "Drinking tea is not a crime in Ohio."

His voice was level and dry.

It was the voice he used on the phone with his dealership managers.

"Pretending to be drunk for a police officer isn't a crime either," the officer said. "Hitting your wife is."

"I have never hit my wife in front of a witness."

Nobody in the study moved.

Conway heard what he had said a beat after the rest of us did.

"Conway," Diane said from the doorway. "Stop talking."

He did not stop.

I understood it then, standing there with the taste of cold tea in my mouth.

For four years he had watched every word he said.

Now somebody was finally looking at him instead of at me, and he could not stand to be misunderstood.

"You think I lose control?" he said to the officer. "Look at my desk. Look at my shelves."

He swept his hand toward the open door of the watch room behind him.

"Thirty-one watches. Not a scratch. Not one vase chipped."

"Sir," the officer said.

"I have never left a mark on her face. Never above the collar, never below the sleeve. Do you know how hard that is, to be careful every single time?"

Lucy made a small sound in the hall.

"A man who loses control breaks things," Conway said. "I decide."

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