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Mariah had decided she’d played enough. And so she left.
And she would live through this, too, by God.
“I should watch a video on what Mama would do to a man who treated her like this,” Mariah muttered to herself, aware as she spoke thatheraccent didn’t slip no matter how angry she got.
But the idea of a video made her laugh a little because she already knew what her mother would do in this kind of situation. She’d gone ahead and done it to Mariah’s father, back in the day, when she’d thrown his drunk, cheating butt out and had never let him back in.
That was when something clicked.
It wasn’t the legend of the way her mother had tossed her naked father out of the house in the middle of the night at gunpoint, then all his belongings after him, though that was one of Mariah’s most tender childhood memories. It had something to do with all those videos she’d watched so obsessively over the past years.
And then it came to her. Just the tiniest little memory of one of those late nights she’d sat up, pretending not to wonder where her husband was—or who he might be with—clicking through video after video on her phone, careful to leave all the lights out so she could pretend she was sleeping and David’s spies could report back to him accordingly.
Somehow she found herself watching an unhinged conspiracy theorist ranting on about satanic signs he’d found in a children’s program. Maybe she’d found a little comfort in the fact that there were people out there a whole lot crazier than a lonely Buckhead housewife whose husband hated her. Openly. She might have been the one staying put in a marriage gone bad, but at least she wasn’t ranting out her every paranoid thought to a video camera.
But the man had said something interesting, there at the end of his garbled insistence that the end was nigh. He’d mentioned a group of superhero-like men off in the wilderness somewhere. Like the A-Team, Mariah had thought at the time. But not illegal. Or faked for television.
Mariah cracked open up her laptop and got to work. It took a while for her to find her way back to that odd video. And then another long while to try to figure out whether or not anything in that video was real.
But eventually she found her way to a stark, minimalist website that had nothing but a name.Alaska Force.And a choice between a telephone number and an e-mail address.
Mariah didn’t overthink it. She typed out an e-mail, short and sweet.
My husband is trying to kill me. He’s already come close twice, and if he gets a third try, he’ll succeed. I know he will.
Help me.