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dead woman’s throat had been sliced open with a steak knife.
    “Bitch probably deserved it,” muttered Tony. They were sitting at opposite ends of the couch.
    Cindy knew better but couldn’t help herself. She turned to stare at him in disbelief. Her face must have shown the disgust she felt.
    An image popped into Cindy’s mind—her stabbing Tony repeatedly with one of her own steak knives. In her fantasy, blood spurted from his chest and neck as she slammed the blade into him over and over again.
    He glanced at her and glowered at her. “What’s your problem?”
    Tony had polished off three bottles of beer. He had never been good at holding his liquor and Cindy did her best to undo the damage.
    “Nothing. I’m sure you’re right.”
    “Don’t fuckin’ sound like it.”
    She shrugged, staring at the photo of the dead woman on the television. Nobody knew where the two-year-old was. Again, she thought of Tony, this time of him stealing Avril from her. It wasn’t impossible.
    “Don’t turn your back on me.”
    She forced a smile and looked at him. “Sorry, I just got distracted, I guess.”
    He could move fast when he wanted, and now was one of those times. He grabbed her wrist and twisted it, almost sitting on top of her.
    She knew he wanted her to cry out, but she’d been trying not to do that. Avril was getting older and noticing things more and more.
    “Please, don’t,” she whispered. “You don’t have to do this.”
    “Now you’re telling me what I should do?”
    “No, I just . . . please, Tony. Let’s just have a drink and—”
    He pushed her back hard into the back of the couch.
    “Sometimes you make me sick,” he said.
    She tried to plead with her eyes, but he didn’t notice. Or he didn’t care. She wasn’t sure which sometimes. He punched her hard in the stomach and knocked the wind out of her. She bent over and tried to breathe, but she couldn’t get any air. A part of her began to panic, thinking she was going to suffocate. She found herself on the floor, her head banged and sore, but that didn’t matter. The pain in her stomach didn’t matter, either, as she gasped for air.
    Soon, she could feel that she was breathing again. She wasn’t going to suffocate.
    Ohmygod, please help me.
    Cindy took a few more minutes to get her breathing back to normal. She was still on the floor and could see Tony’s legs. He was standing in front of her.
    It’s not over , she knew. She closed her eyes and tried to be somewhere else. There was a beach that she’d been to when she was a teenager. It was the only time her parents had ever taken her on a holiday and the trip down the Oregon coast was magical. She’d loved the shoreline and the forests, and her dad even let her tune the car radio to whatever rock station was clearest as they drove. Wilson Phillips, Mariah Carey, Janet Jackson, and Paula Abdul drove down the coast with them.
    Cindy thought of that wonderful summer as Tony beat the shit out of her.
    Through the pain, she remembered the waves, the beautiful huge waves that she could body surf on. Oregon was magical that summer, and she decided she wanted to take Avril back there one day, so she could experience some of the same magic.
    Her back was bleeding, she knew, and he was cracking a leather belt on her legs. She thought only of the sand and surf and the trees and camping and hiking trails and all the other things Oregon gave her that summer. In her mind she was swimming in the ocean when she passed out from the pain.
     
    * * *
     
    Cindy stared again at the testimonials. Of the dozen she skimmed, several were from women who had hired Assassins Inc. to murder their husbands, and according to the grateful comments, they escaped from the pain and sorrow of their awful lives.
    Before she even knew what she was doing, she clicked the button labeled, “Need Help?”
    A pop-up screen appeared. It looked like an old-fashioned DOS prompt that she’d seen when she was a kid on the