She shook her head. “Eugene. My grandfather was a professor at the university there.”
She had always found it ironic—and rather frightening—that her grandfather could have been so beloved on campus yet so harsh and dictatorial at home.
“I graduated from high school a year early and moved to Portland as soon as I could in order to go to art school. My grandfather wasn’t at all happy about it, but I took out loans and earned scholarships and basically told him to go to hell.”
He made a disbelieving sound. “Did you? Somehow I can’t quite picture that.”
“Why?”
He appeared to choose his words carefully. “You’re a very nice person. You’ve been nothing but kind to me, even when I’ve been an ass. Somehow I can’t see you telling anyone to go to hell.”
She did consider herself nice, but that wasn’t the same as weak.
He wasn’t completely wrong, she had to admit. She hated the frightened shadow of herself who had first come to Haven Point. She wanted to be strong and confident again, the woman she had been before Jason died and the world crashed in—and especially the woman she had been before she allowed Rob Warren to climb inside her head and torment her for months.
“You might be surprised,” she told Marshall. “I might look like your average suburban mom now, but there was a time when I was an art school rebel. Henna tattoos, purple hair, emo black clothes and all. I even smoked a joint once at a party. Oh, wait. I probably shouldn’t have told you that. Are you going to arrest me now, Sheriff?”
He gave a rough, amused sound that did crazy things to her nerve endings. When she glanced over, she found he wasn’t quite smiling, but almost.
“You went to art school in Portland. Isn’t that part of the required curriculum?”
This time she was the one who laughed. “If it was, I failed that part of my education miserably. It made me sick, if you want the truth, just like a certain former president I won’t name, so I never tried it again. I guess now you know my guilty secret.”
He knew other things about her, she remembered. Dark, horrible things that the whole town knew had happened to her.
“Anyway,” she said quickly, “a year later I met a handsome rookie cop at the coffee shop where I waitressed so I could make ends meet. Somehow he saw past my attitude and kept coming back for more of the restaurant’s lousy coffee. Eventually he asked me out and the rest is history.”
It was sad history, yes, but lately she’d begun to think about Jason without the crushing pain of loss.
She had lost the husband she loved, yet she couldn’t regret any of it. Pain and all, that fairy tale that ended so sadly had produced two amazing children who filled her world with joy and light and purpose.
“And now here you are creating a new history for your children.”
His words and the quiet understanding in them sent goose bumps rippling over her skin. Yes. That was exactly what she was doing—trying to give Chloe and Will the warm, happy life she hadn’t known herself, in a town that had embraced them all.
“It’s worked out better than I ever could have hoped,” she said softly. “It was pure chance I picked Haven Point when things became intolerable in Portland. I was in desperate need of a refuge, and what better place than a town that had haven in the name?”
He was silent for a long time. When she glanced over, she saw his features looked stony, cold. Dangerous.
When he finally spoke, his voice was as hard as his features. “I wish I’d torn that bastard Rob Warren to pieces during the months he stayed at my jail.”
* * *
SHE GAVE HIM a shocked look for just an instant, then turned her attention back to the road, blinking rapidly, and Marshall saw her fingers tighten on the steering wheel.
“It must have been tough for you, trying to be courteous to the man who shot your sister,” she said.
He hadn’t been thinking of his sister just now, though he supposed he should have been. “He messed with a Bailey, which was a big mistake,” he acknowledged. “What he did to you—a fellow cop’s widow? That’s unforgivable, in my book.”
Every time he thought about what had happened to the kind, compassionate woman behind the wheel of her SUV, Marshall wanted to pound something.
He hated thinking someone had taken advantage of her sorrow, her neediness, and forced himself on her.
She had been violently raped by a man she had trusted, her husband’s partner and a man she had relied on in the first difficult months after Jason Montgomery gave his life trying to rescue someone else.
Rob Warren was a narcissistic sociopath who had masqueraded as one of the good guys for too damn long. The only solace Marshall could find in the whole thing was remembering that ex-cops rarely fared well in prison.