My father found me limping along the shoulder of a county road with my eight-month-old daughter in my arms, and one simple question forced me to admit what I had been hiding even from myself.
Chapter 1
His pickup pulled ten feet ahead of me so abruptly that gravel spit from beneath the tires. Dad climbed out, took one look at the diaper bag cutting into my shoulder, the pharmacy sack in my hand, and baby Lily asleep against my chest, and his expression changed.
“Beth, what in the world are you doing out here?”
“I’m fine, Dad.”
“You’re limping.”
“My shoe rubbed my heel.”
He glanced behind me. There was no bus stop, no store parking lot, and no car anywhere nearby. Patricia’s neighborhood was almost three miles away.
“You walked to the pharmacy carrying Lily?”
“I needed her prescription.”
Dad stared at me for another second. Then he asked the question I had spent eleven days hoping nobody would ask.
“Why didn’t you drive?”
I looked down at Lily.
Dad knew me too well to accept silence. “Beth, where’s your car?”
“Patricia has it.”
“Your mother-in-law borrowed it?”
“No.”
The word barely came out.
Dad’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean, no?”
“She took my keys.”
His face went still.
I began explaining too quickly. “We had an argument. She thought I’d been leaving the house too much, and since Daniel and I are staying with her, she says there have to be rules.”
Dad blinked. “What does that have to do with your car?”
I swallowed. “She said I’d gotten too comfortable. She said I needed to remember whose roof I was living under.”
“And your car somehow became part of that?”
I nodded.
Dad knew that car. He had helped me inspect it when I was twenty-six, two full years before I ever met Daniel. I had made every payment myself and held the title in my name.
“How long has she had your keys?”
I squeezed the pharmacy bag until the paper crackled.
“Eleven days.”
“Eleven days?”
“It’s complicated.”
“No, sweetheart. Somebody taking your property for eleven days isn’t complicated.”
My phone buzzed.
Daniel.
Where are you?
A second text appeared almost immediately.
Why is the pharmacy taking so long?
Dad noticed my face. “Is that your husband?”
“He’s wondering where I am.”
“Does Daniel know his mother took your car?”
I didn’t answer.
Dad lifted the diaper bag from my shoulder and opened the passenger door of his truck.
“Get in.”
“Dad, I need to get back. Patricia already thinks I’ve been gone too long.”
He looked at me in a way that made my stomach tighten.
“Listen to what you just said. You’re thirty-one years old, walking miles with my granddaughter because you’re afraid your mother-in-law will be upset that you were gone too long.”
“Daniel says he’s handling it.”
“For eleven days?”
“He wants to keep the peace.”
Dad looked at my bleeding heel.
“This isn’t peace.”
I climbed into the truck because I knew arguing was useless. For the first mile I assumed he was taking me to my parents’ house, but then he passed the turn.
“Dad.”
He kept driving.
“Dad, where are we going?”
“You know where.”
My chest tightened as Patricia’s subdivision appeared ahead.
“Dad, please. Don’t make this worse.”
He glanced at me.
“I’m not the one who made it worse.”
My phone continued buzzing in my lap as we turned onto Patricia’s street.
Dad believed he was driving over there to retrieve a set of car keys.
What he didn’t know was that once he started asking questions, he was going to discover my car was only the first part of my life Daniel and his mother had decided they were entitled to control.
