I really couldn’t be sure. I’d watched a lot of crime shows, but I’d only had once incident with the police. It hadn’t been a particularly good one and it gave me pause. I’d called them, panicked. Ben was in one of his moods and I was scared, really scared. Normally, he wasn’t violent, but that night he’d made a mess of the home we shared. He’d lost his mind and had been yelling at me, telling me how worthless I was for the last half an hour. He told me nothing I did was right. All of which wasn’t enough to get me to call the police; his words were pretty standard at that point. But when he’d thrown that vase at my head, when it shattered against the wall and a shard had sliced across my cheek, well, he’d crossed a line.
The police promised to send someone to check on us. They did and the
