Chapter Text
She'll never forget the intensity of his eyes when he takes her aside.
"I hope you won't be offended if I'm wrong," he says quietly, "But if I am, you and your daughter deserve better than this."
She tenses, and resists the urge to find a mirror to check the heavy make-up covering her bruises. He has no reason to talk to her--she's only the wife of a material witness (for the defense, no less), but he's standing there anyway. More than that, he's looking at her like she's an actual human being (when was the last time anyone had done that?), and she isn't afraid, not beyond a certain expected anxiety.
He presses a stack of business cards into her hand, and leaves before she can shake the sense of vertigo enough to reply. God knows what she would have said anyway, really. Stomach churning, she ducks into to the restroom and searches her reflection for the thing that gave her away. The first thing she checks is her make-up, and her muscles loosen a little when she finds nothing showing through it. Next is her hair; there's a small patch near the back that's scabbed over and bare, but that's completely hidden by her careful bun. She checks her clothes for anything that might have given her away, and doesn't find it. The only thing wrong with the woman in the mirror is the fear in her eyes, and an unfortunate tendency to flinch.
She locks herself in one of the stalls and flips through the cards with shaking hands: the Domestic Violence Intake Center, an emergency shelter, and his own. The last has a cell number scrawled on the back, and a message.
You are strong enough to leave. If you can't do it for yourself, do it for your daughter. A dark spot of ink where a pen had been held too long, and then, in more hesitant letters, I wish my mother had. Her breath catches in her throat and sticks there. You are not alone.
She doesn't call him. She can't call him. But she does call her sister, and begin to talk in broken words that take forever to come. Shortly after that she takes her daughter and leaves while her husband is sleeping. They move into her sister's house.
She never does call the number on the back of the card. But in the months and years that follow, when she's afraid in the middle of the night, she'll take the card from the bottom drawer of her nightstand and hold it like a talisman.