He Hits You? Suck It Up So I Locked Them in With My Abusive Husband novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: The Dark Forty Minutes

The prosecutor slid a pair of headphones across the table.

"I'll sit with you," she said. "If you want to stop, say so."

"I won't."

She pressed play.

For a moment there was only the hum of the vault's air vents.

Then a bench creaked, and the pastor's voice came out of the left ear, low and close to the microphone.

"Diane, how long does she have us in here?"

"Forty minutes," Conway said. "Then it opens. Sit down, Pastor."

"I have a sermon to write."

"You'll have a better one by morning."

Somebody laughed, short and ugly.

It was the uncle.

"Sit down and say nothing to the police but the truth," he said. "She locked us in, Conway was sleeping off a few drinks, and we told her to calm down."

"Good," Diane said.

"What about the tea?" the aunt said.

My hands closed on the edge of the table.

"The tea is in my glass and my mother's bag," Conway said. "Nobody has ever looked in either. Nobody will."

"She smelled your glass at Easter," the cousin said.

"She smelled it and said nothing. She won't say anything. She never has."

I heard my own breath in the headphones.

I had smelled it at Easter, a flat sweet smell, and I had thought he'd mixed it with soda.

"Four years," the aunt said. Her voice was thin. "I told myself it was wine. I said it to myself in the car, Diane. I said, he drinks, he can't help it."

"You told her the same thing in March," Diane said. "At the lake house."

"Because you asked me to."

"Because you wanted to hear it."

Nobody on the tape said no.

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