TO KRISTIN T., a quiet hero

Prologue

      Kelly Scanlon Devereaux drove home late and alone. It was fast approaching midnight, the downside of having lost her job along with her marriage. She’d had to take a temporary position waiting tables, and it was beginning to look as if she’d never work again as a medical billing clerk. At least not around here.

      That was the cost of divorcing a prominent plastic surgeon: No other doctor wanted to hire her under the circumstances, and so far the hospitals had had no openings.

      At least she had shed Dean Devereaux. Mostly. There was still the divorce to get through in a few months, but in the meantime she had her own place and didn’t have to live in constant terror that she would to make Dean mad.

      Only now that she was free of that threat did she realize just how nervous and tense she had been for most of the last eight years. Now she often wondered why she had put up with it for so long.

      She knew her way around Miami like the back of her hand and chose her route to avoid dangerous neighborhoods. It made her trip longer, but she didn’t care. A little extra time in the car was a small price to pay for freedom.

      The truth was, however, that she wouldn’t feel truly free until the divorce was final. Her hands tightened on the steering wheel as the anxiety hit her again, and she took a couple of deep breaths to steady herself.

      Up until today, Dean had been ugly about the whole thing. He didn’t like losing, and watching him over the last few months since she’d filed for divorce had been an eye-opener. That man actually thought of her as a possession.

      He’d fought the court’s decision to give her separate maintenance and had lost. Her attorney had had to hire forensic accountants to find his assets. And she had been mad enough about the way he had treated her, especially over the last year of their marriage when he had started to hit her, that she had wanted to gouge him.

      Cripes, he’d even told her she wasn’t going to live long enough to see a settlement. Ugly, ugly.

      But today, just today, her lawyer had called to tell her that Dean had agreed to the settlement, that he had signed the papers.

      She was still reeling from that. Her attorney assured her that Dean had changed his mind in order to avoid the publicity of a messy trial, in which his own wife would accuse him of physical abuse, and maybe the lawyer was right. It could hardly help the practice of a man who spent his life making beautiful, wealthy women more beautiful to have it known that he was a wife beater.

      So maybe the end was in sight. Her lawyer said Dean couldn’t change his mind now, that the papers his attorney had sent were almost as good as the court’s seal on the settlement.

      But she realized, now that she had won, that she didn’t care much about the money. She cared most about the painful places the whole mess had left, and worse, the realization that she hadn’t been strong enough to stand up to the man all those years. That she had taken it and taken it, and blamed herself for not being good enough.

      That she had been drawn in by charm, flattery and all the oiliness of a snake.

      Ugh.