Her Love Came Too Late novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Night 199
Elliott waits at the stage door as always and is beaten as the stalker ex; the police take him in, his wife watches from her car, and he walks out of the marriage on the spot.
At eleven o'clock Elliott Hartley stood at the side door of the Ardmore Theater, where he had stood for five years.
His wife had asked him to wait there after every show.
"Not in the car park," Marin always said. "The car park has cameras."
He held her coat over one arm and her water bottle in his other hand.
Through the steel door he could hear the crowd singing her last chorus back to her.
A big man in a tour shirt was already standing by the dumpsters, facing the door.
He looked up when Elliott came around the corner.
"Right on time," the man said.
Elliott gave him the polite nod he gave every fan.
Then three more men stepped out of the dark behind the dumpsters, and none of them were smiling.
"That's him," the second one said.
"I'm just waiting for someone," Elliott said.
The big man took a fistful of his coat and slammed him against the brick.
"You're waiting for her. Five years she's been telling you no. What part of it don't you hear?"
Elliott dropped the water bottle.
He had a rule for these nights, the same rule he had followed for 198 of them, and the rule was that he did not say who he was.
Marin had made him promise.
"They'd never believe it anyway," she had said once, laughing. "And Russ would kill me."
The first punch caught his cheekbone.
The second split the skin beside his eye, and the blood ran warm into his collar.
"Hanging around a woman who doesn't know your name," the man said, and hit him again.
Somebody was holding a phone up, filming.
Elliott slid down the wall and put his arm over his head.
Sirens came a few minutes later, as they always did.
Two officers pulled the men off him, and the big man pointed at Elliott from three feet away.
"Arrest him! He's the one who's been stalking her!"
"Sir, we'll sort it out at the station," the younger officer said, and he sounded tired.
They put Elliott in the back of the car anyway, because that was the quickest way to keep the crowd calm.
The Fourth Precinct's front desk was bright and cold and smelled of burnt coffee.
The big man sat on the bench by the door and kept shouting.
"Look at him! A grown man chasing a girl who sings about getting away from him!"
Elliott sat on a metal chair with a paper towel pressed against his eye.
Behind the desk, the night officer looked up from her screen.
Her name tag said GREER.
She was about thirty, with dark blonde hair pulled into a knot, and she had processed Elliott across that desk forty-one times in two years.
Every time, she had started with the same sentence.
"Mr. Hartley, hold still."
She came around the counter with a first-aid box and an ice pack from her drawer.
"That needs stitches," she said, lifting the towel.
"It always does."
"You should stop saying that as a joke."
She pressed the ice pack to his cheekbone, and her hand was steady and dry.
Elliott's phone buzzed in his pocket.
He took it out with his free hand.
Marin: I'm outside. Stay calm, I'll fix it after the tour. Love you.
He looked through the glass doors.
A black car sat at the curb with its engine running.
The window was down a few inches, and he could see her face in the streetlight, her chin on her folded arm.
She had been there the whole time.
She was thirty feet from him, and she had not opened the car door.
"That's her," Officer Greer said quietly, without turning around. "The singer. She's been out there since you came in."
"I know."
"Do you know her?"
He could have said it then.
The big man was still shouting from the bench, and Elliott thought about the 198 nights before this one, and the way he had counted each of them.
It was the first time he had admitted to himself that he had been counting.
"Officer," he said. "I'd like to make a statement."
"About the assault?"
"About me."
She waited.
Elliott put the ice pack down on the desk and took hold of his wedding ring.
It was a plain gold band, and it came off harder than he expected, because he had never taken it off in five years.
He laid it on the desk next to the stamp.
"I'm done," he said. "That's all of it. I'm done."
Officer Greer looked at the ring, and then at his face.
She stamped his release anyway, because there were no charges to hold him on, and she did not ask him a single question.
He had never noticed before that she had stopped asking.
"Get that eye sewn up," she said.
"I will."
He stood, and walked out through the glass doors, and stopped by the black car.
The window did not come down.
Marin looked at him through the glass, and then at her phone.
His own phone buzzed in his hand.
Marin: Please don't tell them you're my husband. Russ already has the statement ready.
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