Safe With Me by Amy Hatvany Read Free Book Online Page A

out.”
    They hang up, and Hannah strips off her clothes. As steam fills the bathroom, she moves her fingers across her belly, brushing over the stretched, soft skin and silvery lines that carrying Emily created. She wishes she had more scars than these. She wishes the evidence of her pain were somewhere other than inside her body, believing that if other people could actually see how deeply she is wounded, they’d know to just leave her alone.
    Climbing into the tiled shower, she stands under the hot water, letting it scald her skin. For some reason, she thinks about the cars she saw on the road during her run this morning.She watched the drivers talk on their cell phones and sip from their Starbucks coffee cups—how they took everything for granted. She wanted to warn them, to tell them how quickly everything can change, but she knew it was useless. There’s simply no telling whose life will be touched by tragedy. There is only a before and an after, with no way to predict the moment when one is over and the other begins.

Olivia
    During the months that James traveled to Tampa to see Olivia on the weekends, he talked a lot about what it was like to live in Seattle. “It gets a bad rap because of all the rain,” he told her, “but it’s actually really beautiful. More shades of green than I can name.”
    “I’d love to see it sometime,” Olivia said, hoping she wasn’t being too presumptuous. The truth was she wanted to visit the city so she could have a better picture of what he was doing when he wasn’t with her. She could pull up vague mental images of him surrounded by people wearing galoshes and holding umbrellas as he strolled around the base of the Space Needle or stood on the deck of a ferry, but that was pretty much the limit of her visual knowledge about the Pacific Northwest.
    “You will,” he assured her. “But your mother needs you here, doesn’t she? It’s easier for me to come to you.”
    Reluctantly, she agreed with him. She couldn’t afford a private nurse for her mother, and since they were only dating atthe time, there was no way she would let James foot that kind of bill, even if he’d offered. So it wasn’t until they were newlyweds that Olivia saw James’s house. She gasped as their driver pressed the button for the automatic gate to open, allowing her a view of the imposing structure at the end of the road. The house was hers, too, she supposed, now that they were married. Married, she thought. I’m twenty-three years old and married to an amazing, accomplished man. A man who adores me and has promised to take care of my every need .
    It was a new experience for her, being cared for. Since her parents divorced when she was five and her father decided he’d rather not bother spending time with his daughter, it had always been just Olivia and her mother. “We’re better off without him,” Olivia’s mother said. They’d struggled over the years, trying to make ends meet, but her mother insisted that she’d never marry again—that overall, men weren’t worth the bother of having them around. “They take what they want from you and then spit you back out,” she told Olivia more than once. “They use you up and then throw you away.”
    Her mother’s bitterness lingered in the air of their tiny apartment like secondhand smoke. Olivia did her best to not breathe it in, to believe that someday, she might find a man who would fall in love with her. She promised herself that when she got married, it would be forever. She remembered her mother constantly picking at her dad, screaming at him over silly things like him not taking out the garbage, and a small part of Olivia blamed her mother for her father’s abandonment of them both. She swore that someday, she’d be a sweet, gentle wife who never yelled, so her husband would never leave. She pictured herself living with him—cooking forhim and climbing into his bed at night, giving birth to their children, growing old in the