No River Too Wide by Emilie Richards Page B

think.”
    “If I were you right now, I would need to relax, and maybe a little wine will help.”
    “It’s hard. For months I’ve been gearing up to go one place, and now I’m in another. I never intended to come to Asheville at all. It seemed too dangerous. But after the fire? I just knew Harmony would find out somehow, and she would be sure I was dead. I couldn’t let that happen.”
    “I’m so glad you came.”
    Jan still wasn’t sure. All this well-meant reassurance didn’t take into account the will or the whims of the man she had been married to.
    “Did you have a place to go?” Taylor asked. “I mean a house, a job, a life somewhere else?”
    “We were working on it. Then Rex didn’t come home from work, and I knew I had to leave right away while I had that chance.”
    “But you were able to get things in place quickly.”
    Jan wanted to tell Taylor more, but sharing her life, even a little piece of it, was a luxury she hadn’t experienced in years.
    “Not quickly,” she said. “Last New Year’s I met a woman at a party. I didn’t go to many parties, but this one was, well, it was required for my husband’s job, so I had to go along and look happy.”
    “I’m guessing over the years you’ve learned to be a good actress.” Taylor set a salad on the counter and turned to do something at the stove.
    “I like to cook,” Jan said, while she decided how to respond to that. “I could cook for you while I’m here, take some of that off your shoulders, anyway.”
    “Great. We’ll work that out.”
    Jan took another sip to steady herself. “At that party? There was a woman who knew my husband. I’d met her a couple of times over the years. She got me off to one side when he was talking business with some men. And she said she worried about the way he treated me. She told me to call her if I needed help, that she was part of a group of women who helped other women who had trouble at home.”
    “How did she know that just from seeing you at a party?”
    “Later she told me her first husband nearly killed her before she got out of the marriage. She recognized a fellow sufferer from the fear in my eyes. And she knew Rex well enough to suspect he could be mean.”
    Taylor whistled softly. “It was that obvious?”
    “I had bruises on my wrist. She paid attention. And she said I needed to get out while I still could.”
    “You said she was part of a group of women who do this?”
    “More like a network all over the country.” Jan hesitated, but there was no reason to do so. Taylor wasn’t going to turn anybody in. “Lady truckers. They call themselves Moving On. My husband sells insurance for trucks, and that’s why we were all at that party together.”
    “That’s rich. Who better?”
    “I called her two weeks later. One morning she waited until Rex left for the office. Then she came into our place the back way. We talked for an hour. She told me what they did and how successful they were. It’s been going on for years. Sometimes women go back to the men who beat them, because they can’t adjust, but nobody who stayed away has ever been found. I’ve wanted to get away for years, but...” It was too difficult to explain. She shrugged. “Anyway, I wanted to leave sooner, but Rex was watching me.”
    “I’m not a counselor, just a friend, and a new one. I think it’s going to be difficult to put all that behind you. It’s going to take years. But you said something earlier that I want to put out on the table. You said you weren’t going to bore me with stories of your past?”
    Jan realized she had done just that again. She didn’t know what to say, but Taylor went on.
    “If we’re going to be friends, and I want to be, we’re going to have to bore each other with stories of the past. Because that’s what friends do. Only neither of us will be bored, Jan, because friends are interested in each other. I know you’ve been through hell, and whenever it’s helpful to talk