My Loving Family Paid to Destroy Me novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Ambulance
Rescued on camera after five years, Nolan hears his wife say casually that she hired his kidnappers, has her arrested, and finds his family's lawyer already waiting.
The cameras caught me the second I walked out of that barn on my own two feet.
There were police cars with their lights going, floodlights on poles, and a wall of news vans behind the yellow tape.
Five years in a cellar, and the first sound I heard in the open air was a stranger screaming my name.
"Nolan Thayer is alive! He's alive!"
My wife was the one holding me up.
Laurel had come down the cellar steps with the police, in a plain black jacket, her hair cut short and her face thinner than I remembered.
She said my name once, very quietly.
Then she got her shoulder under my arm and walked me across the whole muddy yard without letting go.
I cried in front of every camera in the state, and I did not care who saw.
I thought, five years, and she never gave up on me.
A paramedic wrapped me in a foil blanket and sat me on the back step of an ambulance.
Laurel climbed in after me.
A young officer with a camera clipped to his vest took the seat by the doors.
"Procedure, sir," he said. "We record everything tonight."
The paramedic shone a light in my eyes and then checked my teeth.
"You're in better shape than I expected," he said. "Lungs are clear. Nothing broken."
He glanced at Laurel, then back at me.
"Somebody looked after you down there."
"I had pneumonia in my second year," I said. "A doctor came with a bag and stayed three days."
"Kidnappers don't usually do that."
"No."
I laughed, and it came out cracked.
"Nobody ever hit my face either, and I never understood why."
Laurel was tearing a strip of tape off a roll for my arm.
She did not look up.
"I should tell you before somebody else does," she said.
She said it the way she used to ask whether I wanted rice or pasta.
"I'm the one who hired them."
I thought I had misheard her.
"I was in the alley the night they took you," she said. "I watched them knock you out and tie your hands and put you in the car."
She pressed the tape flat across my elbow.
"Then I paid them every month for five years to keep you down there."
The paramedic stopped moving.
The officer's hand went to his shoulder radio.
"Say that again," I said.
"I hired the men who took you." She smoothed the tape once more. "I'm not going to tell you why."
My hand closed around her wrist before I knew I had moved.
"Five years."
My voice broke on it.
"I begged those men every single day. I told them my wife would pay anything to get me back."
"I know," Laurel said. "They told me."
That was when I stopped being able to breathe properly.
She took my hand off her wrist, gently, and set it back on my knee.
"Eat something when they let you. You've lost thirty pounds."
I stared at her.
She had stood at my cellar door, pulled me up the steps, and let me think she was the one who had saved me.
I turned to the officer.
"Arrest her."
"Mr. Thayer, are you sure?"
"She just told you she did it. You heard her and so did your camera. Arrest my wife."
Laurel held out both wrists before he could reach for his cuffs.
She did not argue and she did not cry.
"Nolan, one thing," she said.
"Don't say my name."
She nodded, and she said nothing else.
The officer cuffed her under the dome light and walked her out into the glare.
I watched her go past every camera with her chin up.
"Nolan!"
A woman's voice cracked across the yard.
My mother ran through the police line in her house slippers, with her coat open over her nightgown.
She hit me so hard that the ambulance rocked.
"My baby. My baby, my baby."
Her hands were all over my face, my hair, my collarbones.
She smelled of cinnamon and fabric softener, like every Sunday of my childhood.
My brother Trenton came behind her and wrapped both arms around the two of us.
"You're home, big guy," he said into my neck. "Nobody is ever going to hurt you again."
I held on to him and shook.
My father came last.
Howard Thayer walked across that yard like a man crossing his own lawn, and every officer stepped aside for him.
He put one big hand on my shoulder, the way he always had.
"She will never see daylight again, son," he said. "I give you my word."
"Mr. Thayer."
A gray-haired man in a pressed suit stood at my father's elbow, holding a leather folder.
He wore good shoes, and there was not one speck of mud on them.
"I'm counsel for your family," he said. "Please don't speak to the press, or the police, or anyone at all until we've sat down together."
I nodded.
Then I looked over his shoulder at the clock on the ambulance dashboard.
The rescue was forty minutes old.
The police had not released my name.
Nobody had called my family yet, because I had heard the dispatcher say so.
My father already had a lawyer standing in the mud in his best shoes.
I was too happy to ask how.
Behind us the police car pulled away with its lights off.
Through the back window, Laurel was not looking at me.
She was looking at my father.
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