Rachel Lee - Her Hero in Hiding

“It seems like it. Almost twenty years ago, the post office stopped giving out forwarding addresses so stalkers couldn’t follow people who moved. Maybe that helped back then, but today you can get the address of anyone in the country for a few dollars. And if you have more than a few dollars, apparently you can find out a whole lot more. I’m not sure exactly how he does it, but once I’ve been in a place for a while, Kevin finds me. Three times now. How the hell do you hide?”

“Actually,” he said slowly, “you can hide. But it’ll involve a lot of changes. We can talk about it later.”

She offered to help with the dishes, but he declined, telling her it was better for her to rest. Twenty minutes later, he rejoined her in the living room.

“Do you need to shower?” he asked before he sat. “I can get you some more sweats.”

“Maybe later on the shower.” She needed one, but she wasn’t confident enough of her stability yet, and she sure didn’t want to have to ask this stranger for help with that.

“Sure. More coffee?”

He freshened her mug and got one of his own before settling into his easy chair. The storm outside kept right on ripping around them. He tilted his head to one side. “This isn’t going to blow over soon.”

“That’s okay,” she said. It gave her a few additional hours of safety before she would have to figure out how to move on again.

“I suppose it is.”

No, she realized, it wasn’t. Not for him. He was a self-confessed hermit, and now he was stuck with an invader until such time as he could reasonably boot her out the door.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“For what?”

“Imposing on you like this.”

“Oh, for the love of Pete!”

She shrank back against the pillows. He was an unknown, and she hadn’t meant to anger him. He could do almost anything to her.

But he remained firmly planted in the chair, though he looked disgusted, a change from his usually unrevealing attitude. “Look,” he said, “I know neither of us likes this situation. I prefer my solitude, and you’d sure as hell prefer not to have a lunatic ex-boyfriend trying to kill you, chasing you everywhere you go. But you know what? Sometimes we don’t have a choice. We just have to do what needs doing. And right now what needs doing is giving you the safety and space in which to recover. So what if it disturbs my sacred solitude?”

“I’m still sorry,” she said, weakly, not sure whether she was sorry for angering him or for the whole damn mess.

“Quit apologizing. You don’t have a thing to apologize for. I know I’m not exactly a warm, fuzzy kind of host, but if you think I resent the fact that you need help and I’m here to provide it, you’re wrong.”

“Okay.” She wanted to get away from this topic as quickly as possible.

But even though he could have dropped it there, he didn’t. Evidently he had plenty of thoughts on this subject.

“You have rights, and I have responsibilities,” he said flatly.

Now, that really did confuse her. “What rights?”

“You,” he said, “have a right to exist without terror. You have a right to expect the rest of us to step up and get you away from this guy, since he seems hell-bent on following you wherever you go. You have a right to expect help, and apparently you haven’t been getting it.”

“But you have rights, too.”

“Hell, yeah, but I can protect my own.”

“And you don’t have a responsibility to me.”

“Oh, yeah, I do.”

She tried to shake her head, but as soon as she did, she remembered her concussion as pain stabbed her head. “I’m nobody. You don’t owe me a thing.”

“You’re not nobody. You’re a human being, and that gives you certain rights in my book. And I’m a human being, and that’s enough to make me responsible to do what I can for you.”

Her mouth opened a little as she stared at him. She couldn’t remember anyone ever putting it like that before.

He leaned forward, putting his mug on the coffee table, then resting his elbows on his knees. “You want to know one of the reasons why I prefer my own company?”

She wasn’t sure she did, but he didn’t wait for her answer.

“Because too many people have forgotten their responsibilities. Too many people look the other way, or take the easy path. Anything but put themselves out for someone who needs help.”

“Not everyone is like that.”

“Of course not. But too many are, and I’m sick of them, frankly. All this talk of personal responsibility that people toss around overlooks a very important fact.”

“Which is?”

“That your personal responsibility doesn’t end at the tip of your own nose. Or at your own front door.”

She bit her lip, then ventured, “You’ve thought a lot about this.”

“I spend a lot of time thinking about responsibility. My own. Accepting it. Then deciding what it should have been all along.”

She longed to ask him what had put him on such a personal private quest, but didn’t dare. There was a darkness in this man that she could feel all the way across the room. It lurked in his gray eyes like a ghost. Maybe it was best not to know.

He picked up his mug again and sat back, sipping slowly while minutes ticked by.

“Any family?” he asked abruptly.

“Me?”

“You.”

“No. I oh, do you want to hear the whole story? It sounds like a cliché.”

“A lot of life is made up of clichés. Tell me whatever you don’t mind sharing.”

She looked down and realized her hands were twisting together. She forced herself to separate them and lay them flat. Then she shrugged a shoulder, ignoring the ache. Apparently Kevin had hit her there, too. Not that she remembered, there had been so many blows.

“My mother died of an overdose when I was four. Nobody knew who my dad was. So my grandmother took care of me until she died of a heart attack when I was thirteen. After that it was foster homes. Six of them. I don’t think I was easy to deal with. And there’s nobody else.”

“You made it through high school, though?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I did. I always wanted to go to college, but I had to take care of myself and kept putting it off and then … well, Kevin …” She bit her lip again, unable to meet his gaze.

“Tell me about Kevin. About the beginning.”

She hesitated, unable to imagine why he wanted all this information, but reluctant to tell him it was none of his business. He’d rescued her in the middle of a blizzard where she probably would have died except for him. That gave him a right to know, she supposed. Especially since he was still helping her.

“Kevin was okay at first. Really nice. It was a long time before I realized that I was tiptoeing around all the time because of his temper. It took me even longer to realize he couldn’t hold a job for more than a month or two, and finally I gave up even trying to tell him to look for work. So I did something stupid.”

“And that was?”

She drew a long breath. “I started skimming my paycheck.”

“You what?” He sounded utterly disbelieving. “How can you skim your own paycheck?”

“I got a raise and didn’t tell him. I’d go to the bank and split the deposit, put the extra money into a savings account. I meant to save for school.”

“And you didn’t tell him.”

“No.”

He sighed. “That’s a warning sign in huge red letters. But I suppose he had you so intimidated by that point that you didn’t even recognize it.”

“Not really. I just did it. I didn’t exactly think about all the reasons I felt the need to. When I look back, I feel stupid.”

“No, don’t. You have no idea how many people, doing the best they can in whatever situation they’re in, look back later and think they were stupid. It’s never stupid. It’s the best you can do at the time.”