Free Breaking the Rules by Suzanne Brockmann

with its phone number out of the wet, even as he desperately tried to get away.
    “I’ll beat you, boy,” Greg was screaming, showering him with spittle as he grabbed hold of Ben’s hair and pulled. “I will beat you within an inch of your—”
    Ben elbowed him in the stomach, doing some kicking himself to get free.
    His knee must’ve collided with Greg’s balls, because his stepfather screamed in pain and then started retching, finally letting go of Ben, who scrambled to his feet. He jammed the letter into his pocket as Greg curled, rocking, into a ball. If he’d known it would be that easy to win, he would’ve fought back years ago.
    He had time to open the refrigerator and sweep his entire supply of insulin into a plastic shopping bag. He took the OJ carton, too, because he was still feeling pretty majorly out of body. He picked up the bag of clothes for the girl at the mall—there wasn’t time for him to pack anything for himself, which was a shame. And then, as Greg wasstarting to make more intelligible sounds, Ben went out the front door, letting the screen screech and slap behind him, in one final
fuck you
.
L ANDSTUHL , G ERMANY
M ONDAY, 4 M AY 2009
    This was a bad idea.
    Cynthia the nurse lived in a small apartment without a roommate, which meant the collections of teddy bears and Hummel figures and look—a Hummel figure teddy bear—were all hers.
    What was she, ten? No, apparently not. There was a multitude of birthday cards artfully arranged on an end table that sat between a matching sofa and chair—both perkily, neatly floral-printed.
Big Three-Oh
one of the cards said in a cartoon bubble coming out of the mouth of a … wait for it … teddy bear. Yeah. The others were more Hallmarkie.
Love and affection for my darling daughter on this special day
kind of stuff.
    There were a dozen of them. Two from her mother, one from her father and stepmother, the rest from aunts and uncles and cousins and friends. It was pretty impressive—the size of her support team. Impressive and nice. A lot of military personnel, himself included, didn’t get even one card on their birthdays.
    The apartment itself was impeccably clean and neat, and looked like something out of a Pottery Barn catalog. Everything had a place where it belonged, and the artwork on the walls was in perfect harmony with the beflowered furniture.
    Of course, maybe she’d rented the place furnished and none of this was hers.
    But the tidiness was all Cynthia—no doubt about that. There was no clutter anywhere. Not even a small pile of mail or a book out and open, spine up, on the coffee table. No sneakers kicked off while she watched TV and … Come to think of it, there was no TV.
    She’d gotten a phone call right after unlocking the door and lettinghim in and he’d given her privacy by hanging here in her little living room while she bustled into the kitchen to start cooking dinner.
    Izzy now wandered over to a small collection of DVDs and CDs that sat on a shelf beneath the bears. Her music was limited to classical. She had a lot of Wagner operas, which was alarming since it was just about
the
only form of music that would make him bleed from the ears while going blind. But the Wagner wasn’t half as alarming as her DVDs. She had only seven—probably to watch on her laptop—and all were foreign art films, with a heavy emphasis on dramas about suicidal Scandinavians, shot in the dark of a northern winter.
    “Why don’t you … um. Do you want to take a shower?” She poked her head out of the kitchen, finally off the phone.
    “Oh. Thanks,” Izzy said as he moved toward the kitchen, where something was smelling very, very good as it cooked. “But no, I’m good.” He stopped short. “At least I think I’m good.” He did a quick pit check, but then realized … “Unless it’s a thing, like you need me to shower …?”
    “No,” she said far too quickly, which made him know it
was
a thing—she definitely liked men