She looked up then, into his eyes. Cocking back, she swung the brush with all her strength, all her fury into his smiling face. As blood erupted from his mouth, she leaped toward the door. Her only thought was to get to her boys, keep them safe.

Her hand closed around the doorknob as he wrenched her back. Fear sprang up again, bright as the blood on his face as he dragged her to the floor. She kicked, tried to claw at his eyes but he slapped her hard enough to have stars erupting.

“Bitch!” He used the back of his hand, shooting pain into her cheekbone. “Look what you did. Look what you did to me. I’m giving you everything, and you don’t learn. You’ll learn now.”

When he tore at her shirt, she raked her nails down his face. He reared up, shock and pain mixed with the blood.

Rolling, she struggled to pull herself free, and suddenly his weight lifted. She crawled for the door, breath sobbing as she tried to pull to her feet, run to her boys.

Arms came around her.

“Clare, Clare, Clare.” Avery held tight until Clare stopped fighting her. “You’re okay now.”

“My babies.”

“Shh. Hope went to see. Shh.”

“I have to—” The sounds finally broke through her shocked senses. Slumped against Avery, she turned her head.

At the foot of her bed, Sam sprawled on the floor with Beckett straddling him. With Beckett’s fist slamming, again and again, into the already bloodied face.

“Oh God. God.” Dizzy, she pushed to her feet, and Hope was there helping Avery steady her.

Seconds later, Owen and Ryder burst in, and Ryder grabbed Owen’s arm when his brother started forward.

“We’ve got to pull him off.”

Ryder shrugged. “Let’s give him another minute.”

“Jesus Christ, Ry.”

Even as Hope sent Ryder one fierce and approving look, Owen shook him off. “Come on, Beck. Stop. Stop, goddamn it. He’s done. Give me a fucking hand, Ryder, before he kills this son of a bitch.”

It took both of them to drag him off. It only took one look at Clare to change his focus. “He hurt you.” He moved to her slowly, touched his fingers gently to the bruises on her face. “He hurt you.”

“I hurt him more. Then you—Beckett.” Shaking now, she clung to him. “Oh God, Beckett.”

“The cops.” Hope glanced toward the windows and sounds of sirens. “I’ll go down, let them know, see if they can keep it quiet and not wake the kids. Oh, and that we need an ambulance.”

She glanced at the unconscious and battered Sam. “But there’s no hurry on that.”

She caught Ryder’s hard grin before she backed out of the room.

“I’m going to take you downstairs, away from him.” Beckett lifted Clare into his arms. “You can tell us what happened downstairs.”

She nodded, let her head drop to his shoulder, hoping the room would stop spinning if it rested there. “Avery.”

“I’ll check on them again. Don’t worry.”

“He said we were leaving tonight,” Clare told Beckett as he carried her down. “Going on a trip, just leaving the kids alone—until he put them in boarding school because they’d be in his way.”

“He won’t touch you or those boys. Ever again.”

“When he told me that, told me to pack a few things? That’s when I hit him with the hairbrush. Hard as I could. I think I knocked one of his teeth out.”

“Upstairs first,” he said to Charlie Reeder as they passed at the bottom on the steps. “You hit him with a hairbrush.”

“It was all I had.”

“No.” He held her tight, sat, held her tight on his lap. “You’ve got a hell of a lot more.”

Beckett sat beside her while she gave her statement, didn’t spare a glance when they took Sam away, cuffed to a gurney. Hope brought her tea while one of the paramedics doctored his torn knuckles.

Once the cops located the jimmied window, documented it, Ryder went out for tools to repair it.

When the police left, Avery came out of the kitchen. “I made soup. When I’m upset I cook, so everybody’s eating soup.”

While she ladled it up in the kitchen, Ryder dropped down to a chair at the table. “Now that the law’s gone, let’s have it straight, what you danced around telling them. How did you know Clare was in trouble?”

“Lizzy.” Beckett laid a hand over Clare’s, and told the story.

“Pretty smart for a dead woman,” Ryder commented with a glance at Hope. “The innkeeper’s going to have her hands full.”

“The innkeeper has a name,” she informed him.

“I’ve heard that.”

“Hope and I are staying tonight.” Avery set soup in front of Owen. “I wouldn’t sleep if I went home. We’re staying.”

“I’d like you to.” Clare let out a long breath. “Elizabeth told you I needed help. And you came.” She turned her hand under Beckett’s, laced fingers. “You all came. I guess that’s a lot more than a hairbrush.”

Beckett didn’t leave until she slept. He tossed Harry’s Spider-Man sleeping bag in his truck before driving to the inn.

He spread it out on the floor of E&D.

“She’s fine. She’s okay, thanks to you. He hurt her a little—but he’d have done worse if you hadn’t let us know.”

He sat, pulled off his work boots. “He’s in the hospital, under guard. He’ll be in a cell as soon as the doctors clear him. One of us broke his jaw—either Clare and her trusty hairbrush or me. Lost his caps, and two teeth. Busted up his nose. I figure he got off easy.”

Exhausted, wired, he stretched out. “Anyway, I thought I’d bunk here tonight, if it’s okay with you. I figured you might like some company, and I’m just not in the mood to go home. I guess I’m the first guest—alive anyway—of Inn BoonsBoro.”

He lay staring at the ceiling. He thought he felt something cool across his throbbing knuckles, then the light he’d neglected to shut off in the bathroom went dark.

“Thanks. ’Night.” He closed his eyes, and he slept.

Sunday morning, at his insistence, kids and dogs loaded in the van.

“We’re supposed to go to the arcade,” Harry reminded him. “You said.”

“Yeah, this afternoon. There’s just something I want to show you first. It’s not far.”

“It certainly is a secret.”

He looked over at Clare. She’d softened the bruises with makeup, but he knew the boys had seen them. Just as he knew she’d told them the truth, if not in every detail.

He drove out of town, listening to Liam and Harry bicker and Murphy sing to the dogs, who’d already learned how to howl in harmony.

Normal, he thought. It all seemed so normal. Yet there were bruises on Clare’s face.

“I can take them to the arcade if you want to stay back and rest.”

“Beckett, he slapped me a few times. It hurt, and it was really scary, but that’s it. And it’s over.” She kept her voice low, under the music from the radio.

He didn’t think it would ever be over for him. Not all the way.

“Hope talked to a friend of hers, a psychiatrist in D.C.,” Clare continued. “She said—best guess as she hasn’t talked to him, observed him—this was classic stalker behavior, with narcissism tossed in. He’d grown more and more obsessed with me, was convinced I wanted to be with him, but kept stringing him along—adding in the kids who were an obstacle. It was one thing when I wasn’t seeing anyone, but my relationship with you caused a kind of psychotic break. Basically, he went off the rails. Now he’s going to jail. He’ll get help. I’m not ready to care if he gets help, but he’ll get it.”

“As long as help comes with bars and a prison jumpsuit, he can have all he wants.”

“Right there with you.” She glanced around. “Doesn’t your mother live over this way?”

“Not far. No, we’re not going there so she can fuss over you again today.”

“Thank God. I had about all the fussing over yesterday I can take from friends, family, neighbors, police. I want to feel, and be, normal and boring today.”

He turned off onto a gravel lane, bore to the right and up a slope. “Ryder lives back that way, Owen over that way,” he added, with gestures. “Not too far, but not too close either.”

He stopped in view of a partial house, and even the partial was still unfinished.