Total pages in book: 141
Estimated words: 134531 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 673(@200wpm)___ 538(@250wpm)___ 448(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 134531 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 673(@200wpm)___ 538(@250wpm)___ 448(@300wpm)
Not enough time to make it home without him knowing. And there was no lie I could conjure that would explain where I had been. Did he have some kind of tracker on my phone? It made sense if he did. He needed to know where I was at all times and likely checked against what I’d told him to see if he could catch me in a lie. He never did because I never lied. I behaved exactly as he expected me to. I was trained well. I never broke the rules.
Until now.
My heart was pounding as this set in.
I was screwed.
I could still go back. Try to lie and take the punishment if he didn’t believe me. He wouldn’t leave marks. We had that doctor’s appointment. And he was serious about another baby. He wouldn’t risk genuinely hurting me.
Eighteen years. Another eighteen years with him.
My blood thrummed with fear and dread as I even considered it.
I couldn’t do it.
Wouldn’t do it.
Although I’d never dreamed I would or could do this, I was running.
And I had nothing with me but the clothes on my back.
The credit card in my purse would alert Preston when and where I made a transaction. I was lucky the car was fully gassed.
The car.
The hideously ostentatious and expensive car. We traded up every two years. I was not the legal owner of the god-awful thing. And when he found out I was gone, he’d be able to track it. Track me.
I pulled into a parking lot as true panic set in. My breathing turned rapid, and stars danced in my vision.
“Get it together, Kate,” I whispered, gripping the staring wheel.
The glint on my finger caught my eye. My wedding ring and band. Both hideously ostentatious too. Preston had upgraded three times in our eighteen-year marriage, each time at huge anniversary parties his parents threw for us yearly. Like the car, the house, the lunches, it was all for show.
This ring was worth a lot of fucking money.
Preston made sure I didn’t have the tools to escape. Made sure I didn’t have access to large sums of cash, couldn’t book anything out of the country, had all of my important identification. But his ego had given me my ticket out of his life.
Same with the earrings at my ears. The watch I wore. The purse.
All of it was bought as gifts. Not for me. For himself, so the town would see how much he spoiled his beautiful wife.
I grinned as I drove out of the parking lot thinking of what the town would say when it became clear that his spoiled, beautiful wife had left him.
Three hours later, I was driving out of the city in an old Toyota. It was bright red, smelled faintly of cigarette smoke and had only cost me a couple of thousand dollars.
I had much more cash tucked into my cheap Walmart backpack. A lot more. I hadn’t sold everything. Not at once. It would be dangerous, a woman on the road alone, carrying large amounts of cash.
No more dangerous than living in my McMansion in New Hampshire for nearly two decades, but I’d had my share of violence. I would be cautious but not afraid.
I was done being afraid.
It was just like that. A switch flipped. I wasn’t sure how such a thing was possible. Weakness was a character trait at this point. I’d been so sure I didn’t have a backbone, a personality of my own.
But whatever it was inside me that snapped, I grew from the cracks of that. Me.
There was a scene in Gone Girl—I’d watched the movie countless times and read the book twice as many—where Rosamund Pike was driving down the road in a piece of shit car, stuffing her face with food after framing her husband for her murder. She looked so utterly free in that scene. I’d watched it over and over with envy.
Not that Ben Affleck’s character quite deserved to be framed for her murder—he was a cheater and kind of a selfish asshole, but he did not deserve that.
Preston, on the other hand, thoroughly deserved to be framed for my murder. Unfortunately, I was not as smart as Amy was in the book. I did not have the guts or the intelligence to fake my own murder and frame my husband, no matter how much I fantasized about it.
It was that car scene I fantasized about. Not my trainer or my neighbor or the hot guy at the coffee shop who always flirted with me. No, it was her in that scene, free for the first time in years, knowing that no one knew where she was, and no one knew who she was.
Unfortunately, I could not Gone Girl my husband, even if I’d had the smarts and the guts. Because of my daughter. The child I adored. The child who worshipped her father and knew nothing of what kind of monster he was.