Safe with Me: A Novel

Olivia lowers herself onto one of the couches in Ciseaux’s reception area just as Hannah comes down the stairs.

“There she is!” the female stylist who greeted Olivia when she came in says, as she runs a comb through her client’s long black hair.

Seeing Olivia, Hannah looks shocked—or is it panicked? Olivia is more than a few minutes early—she decided to come right over after dropping Maddie at school. Maybe she’d forgotten about their appointment.

“Olivia . . .” Hannah begins, but just as Olivia stands to greet her, a stunning, willowy redhead steps out from behind Hannah and stares at Olivia with piercing green eyes.

“The Olivia?” the redhead inquires with a tilt of her head. Confused, Olivia looks to Hannah for clarification.

“Yes,” Hannah says quietly. “Olivia Bell.”

“Hello,” Olivia says, slightly unnerved by the intensity of this woman’s gaze.

“Sophie Renard,” the woman says with a melodic trill as she strides across the room to shake Olivia’s hand. “Hannah’s business partner . . . and best friend.”

“Oh!” Olivia says, glancing over to Hannah, whose expression has morphed from one of shock to one of apprehension. She looks back to Sophie and quickly grasps her hand. “Lovely to meet you.”

“Yes,” Sophie says. “I’ve heard so much about you. And your daughter.”

Before Olivia can ask what, exactly, she has heard about them, Hannah comes around the reception desk, too, putting her arm around Sophie and giving her a tight squeeze. “Sophie was just on her way out,” she says, then looks to Olivia. “I’ll be right with you, okay?”

“Is Hannah doing your hair, too, now?” Sophie asks.

Olivia nods, raising her fingers self-consciously to tuck her hair behind one ear. “If this is a bad time, I can reschedule,” she says, feeling as though she’s just walked in on a conflict she would be better off avoiding.

“It’s not a bad time,” Hannah says, practically shoving Sophie toward the front door. “Veronica, can you please get Olivia some coffee or water? I’ll be right back.” She opens the door, keeping one arm wrapped around Sophie as they move across the threshold and onto the porch. Olivia watches their animated conversation through the large bay window.

“Can I get you something to drink?” Veronica asks dutifully.

“No thank you,” Olivia says, keeping her eyes on Hannah, who looks as though she’s about to cry as Sophie speaks to her. After a few minutes of this, Sophie hugs Hannah, a long, hard movement, during which Hannah’s arms hang loose at her sides. Olivia strains to hear what Sophie says next and thinks she hears the words “If you don’t tell her, I will.” With that, Sophie finally trots down the stairs and out of the yard. What would Hannah have to tell me? Olivia wonders. If, that is, Sophie was referring to me.

Hannah stands extremely still, her shoulders curled and her head down, until her friend climbs inside her car and drives away. Olivia feels the urge to go console Hannah, but something holds her back—a sense that her presence wouldn’t be appreciated. She watches as Hannah takes a deep breath and straightens her posture, then strides toward the front gate, where she checks the white mailbox, which turns out to be empty. Hannah looks up to see Olivia staring at her, and she manages to smile as she scales the front steps and reenters the salon.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Hannah says, smoothing down a few flyaway strands of her black hair. The corners of her mouth twitch, as though her pleasant expression is taking more effort than usual.

“No worries,” Olivia says. “I’m a little early.” She pauses. “Is everything okay?”

“Of course!” Hannah says brightly, and Olivia hates that her new friend feels that she has to hide whatever’s really going on. But then she thinks about the many times she’s lied to the people in her own life and she knows she doesn’t have the right to judge Hannah for any secrets she might feel the need to keep.

Another woman enters the salon, and Veronica rises to greet her. The two of them wander over to Veronica’s station, and Hannah leads Olivia to hers. “Busy morning?” Olivia asks as she lowers herself into the chair and Hannah adjusts the protective cape around her neck. Olivia panics briefly, wondering if there are marks on her skin that Hannah might see, but then she comes to her senses, remembering that James hasn’t choked her in over a decade. But the memory of the night he did has haunted her ever since her brief conversation with Professor Lang; just this morning, she woke up in a cold sweat after dreaming it had happened again.

“A little hectic,” Hannah says, giving her another false smile, then goes on to tell Olivia that the man she met the other night came in for an unexpected appointment.

“Did he ask you out?” Olivia says, watching Hannah’s face in the mirror to gauge her reaction to the possibility.

Hannah blushes and shakes her head. “Strictly business,” she says, but her suddenly shy smile tells Olivia otherwise. “So,” Hannah continues, “are we just touching up your highlights today?”

Olivia twists her head back and forth, staring at her hair—the shade one she has kept so long, it feels like her own. “I’m thinking of going dark again,” she says. “Back to my natural color. Like Maddie’s, maybe.” She looks anxiously at Hannah. “What do you think?”

“I think you’d look amazing. Let me go grab my sample book and we can talk about shading.” A few minutes later, they’ve decided on a warm chestnut with undertones of auburn and honey, which will only show when the sunlight hits them.

Nerves swirl in Olivia’s belly as she watches Hannah squeeze various pastes into a plastic bowl and begin to mix the color. “James isn’t going to be happy about this,” she says in a voice she’s afraid reveals more than she’d like.

Hannah stops what she’s doing and puts the bowl down on the counter. She furrows her thin, dark brows. “It’s your hair, though, right?”

“Of course,” Olivia says. “It’s just . . .” She falters, then begins again. “He prefers me blond.”

“And what do you prefer?” Hannah asks. When Olivia doesn’t respond but instead holds utterly still, Hannah leans down and speaks next to her ear, so that no one else can hear. “I might not know you well enough to say this, but it worries me how scared you are of him.”

Hannah’s words make Olivia feel as though something inside her has dropped down several levels. “I’m not scared,” she murmurs, but she knows she’s not convincing Hannah—or herself.

Hannah turns the chair around and takes off Olivia’s black cape. “Come on,” she says, ignoring the questioning looks from Peter and Veronica as she guides Olivia toward the stairs that lead to her apartment. Once they are in her living room, with the door closed behind them, Hannah lets go of Olivia’s hand and turns to face her. “You can trust me,” Hannah says.

Instead of answering, Olivia moves her gaze over the small space, taking in the spare furnishings, the few books on the shelves. There is a purple velour love seat, a short walnut-hued coffee table, and a flat-screen television hung above the mantel, but otherwise, the room is practically empty. Anyone could live here. Why doesn’t Hannah have any pictures of her daughter? If Maddie had died, Olivia imagines pictures would be her only link to her child—she would want them everywhere. She wonders if seeing them is too much of a reminder for Hannah of all she’d lost. “What a pretty apartment,” she remarks. Her voice sounds strange, not tethered to her body.

“Olivia,” Hannah says, undeterred. “Please. Talk to me.”

“About what?” Olivia responds, her tone as light as she can possibly make it. This isn’t why I came here today. I came to get my hair done.

“James. Why you have to keep secrets from him. It’s not normal, the way he talks to you.”

“You only met him once. He was just . . . in a bad mood.” Olivia turns away, feeling guilty about lying to Hannah. She looks out the bay window at the blue September sky, but Hannah doesn’t give up. She steps over to Olivia and stands in front of her. Olivia tries to avert her gaze from Hannah’s, but she can’t seem to look away from her friend’s pleading eyes. She notices they are lighter in the center, like the sky, but rimmed in dark navy—framed like a picture.

“Does he hurt you?” Hannah asks, her voice low and thick with compassion.

Olivia presses her lips together and shakes her head, still unable to take her eyes off Hannah’s. Her gut churns, as she realizes that Hannah isn’t going to give up. What gave the truth away? James didn’t touch her in front of Hannah the night she came over; Olivia didn’t have any telling bruises. Tears threaten in the back of her throat, and she swallows once, hard, to force them down. She can’t say it. She can’t. She can’t tell a person she barely knows what her life has become, what she’s endured, what she’s allowed her daughter to live with . . . and why. She has to stick to her plan. Get a degree, get a job, get Maddie away at school, and then she can leave him. Only now she’s not sure she can follow through. What seemed so plausible in theory seems impossible in practice; she didn’t return to class after that first day, unable to face what that picture had brought up within her. The disgust she felt, relating to the woman it depicted, the black, aching sense of shame that flooded through her veins. I’m not strong enough, she thinks. I’m not strong enough to save myself. This is my life—I created it. I allowed it to happen. There’s no way out for me.

“His father beat him horribly,” she finally says. “He’s just a product of his environment . . . you know?” She pauses, searching Hannah’s face for the judgment she expects—the same disdain she heard in that young girl’s voice during class when she said the woman in the picture was an idiot. But all she sees in her friend’s eyes is concern—a soft, warm place to fall, someone willing to bear witness to her pain. “It doesn’t happen very often,” she whispers, suddenly unable to keep the tears from spilling down her cheeks.

“Oh, Olivia,” Hannah says, reaching out to take her friend’s hands. She pulls them to her chest, so their faces are only inches apart, their foreheads almost touching. “It shouldn’t happen at all.”

•  •  •

In the end, Olivia doesn’t change a thing about her hair. Instead, she sits with Hannah for the next two hours—the length her appointment would have been—pouring out the dirty details of her life. The words come slowly at first, stuttering out of her in fits and bursts. And after she is done describing how it all started, trying—and failing—to pinpoint the exact moment when everything about her marriage changed, she can’t believe the woman she’s talking about is her. She can’t comprehend the sheer number of times James has raised a hand to her, the humiliation and degradation she’s lived with for almost two decades.

She takes in a few deep, shuddering breaths and waits for Hannah to speak, to ask her why she didn’t call the police or walk out the door years ago. But Hannah is silent. Olivia shakes her head. “I don’t know how he does it,” she says helplessly.

“Does what?” Hannah asks.

Olivia’s bottom lip trembles and she has to bite it before she can speak. “Makes me feel like I’m at fault. We go months and months when everything is fine and then, out of nowhere, he comes home and I do what I always do . . . say what I always say in the exact same way I always say it, and suddenly he’s a different person. It happens so fast. And when it’s over, it’s like I stepped out of my body and watched it happen to another person. Like it wasn’t real. So then I think I’m crazy, that I’m making it worse than it really is, because he pretends like it didn’t happen, too, so I think, Okay, maybe it didn’t. Maybe I’m imagining things.” Out of breath and realizing that she’s babbling, she stops herself and looks at Hannah through watery eyes. “You think I’m stupid, don’t you.” A statement, not a question, because she is so certain it’s true. “For staying with him.”

“Of course not,” Hannah says, gently enough that Olivia almost believes her. “But I guess I wonder . . . can you help me understand why?”

Olivia wipes away her tears with the tips of her fingers. “I was ready to leave. I had money saved and a plan for us to start over without him . . .” She trails off, staring out the window again at the clear blue sky, trying to recall the sense of determination she felt in the weeks after James had choked her, when she first knew she needed to escape. “But then Maddie got so sick so quickly and I could never afford the kind of care she needed on my own. And I just knew if I tried to leave, he would threaten to prove I was unfit and take custody of her away from me.” She swallows a sob, but still, her voice feels shredded as she speaks. “He could have, too. He has those kinds of connections. That kind of power. I couldn’t lose Maddie. I couldn’t. So I stayed.”

“I get it,” Hannah says, though her eyes cloud with an emotion Olivia doesn’t know her well enough to recognize. “Does Maddie . . . ?” Hannah begins, blinks a few times, then starts again. “How much does she know?”

“She suspects,” Olivia says, still tearful, “but he’s never hit me in front of her.” She knows how empty this statement sounds, though she still wishes it could absolve her of the choices she’s made.

Hannah leans forward, intent. “Has he ever hit her?”

“Never,” Olivia says vehemently. “He loves Maddie.”

“Do you love him?” Hannah asks, visibly relieved to hear that James doesn’t raise his fists to his daughter.

Olivia presses her lips together, hard, and bobs her head. This is maybe the hardest thing for her to admit—that despite everything he’s done to her, the horrid way he’s treated her over the years, a part of her is still enamored with James. She thinks of the moments they’ve shared—lying together in bed, his body curled up behind hers, the tears he’s shed when he allows himself to talk about his past, the insecurities he’s allowed only her to see. His fits of anger are always tempered by long stretches of passion and gentility. Her feelings about him are strung together in wild, complicated knots—fear braided tightly with adoration, tenderness shot through with shame. She has no idea how to unwind one from the other. “I can’t leave him,” she says to Hannah now. “I want to . . . but I just can’t.”

“With the right lawyer, you can fight him,” Hannah says, with a determined edge in her voice. “You and Maddie can get away. You can call the police, you can get a restraining order . . . and he’d have to pay child support. He can’t just stop Maddie’s health insurance, either. He’d be legally required to take care of you both.”

“You don’t understand,” Olivia whispers. “He’ll take her so he won’t have to.” She goes on to explain her plan to get a degree and leave when Maddie went to college. “But it was a stupid idea, really. I’m not going to be a lawyer. I’m not going to be anything.” She hears the defeat in her words and she hates it. She hates how weak she’s become, how inadequate she feels to change her own life.

“You can be whatever you make up your mind to be,” Hannah says and then releases a long, slow breath. “I won’t try to tell you what you should do. Only you can decide that.” She hesitates and opens her mouth, as though about to speak again, but quickly closes it.

“What?” Olivia asks. “What is it?”

“I just . . .” Hannah begins, then trails off, her lips pushed into a deep frown. She appears on the verge of saying something important, something Olivia might not want to hear. She looks nervous. This is it, Olivia thinks, her stomach twisting. This is where she tells me she thinks I’m an idiot for being with James. This is where the truth comes out.

“I just want you to know that I’m here for you,” Hannah finally says. “Okay? However you might need me.”

“Thank you,” Olivia says shakily. She looks at Hannah, wondering how they got to this intimate place in their new friendship so quickly, and concludes that perhaps it’s because they don’t know each other very well that Olivia feels safe enough to open up. Sometimes it’s easier to talk to someone who doesn’t have preconceived notions of who you are, no expectations based on past behavior, no running commentary on the choices you’ve made in your life. Hannah seems to take Olivia exactly as she is in this moment, and it’s because of this that—for the first time in as long as she can remember—Olivia feels like she’s finally found someone she can trust.