Second Chance At Love •J.B•

Chapter 2

Thank you to justintheunicorn for my AMAZING book cover!

Isabella

Three years later

Great, more stuff to pack.

"Hey, Sam. Can you please come up here and finish packing these clothes?" I screamed downstairs praying that my son would haul his butt into high gear.

It was moving day and I just had to get out of Chicago.

There were too many bad memories. How could I continue to stay here when every horrible scene of the past six years had been playing in my mind?

"Mom, come on. I can't carry another box." My five-year old son whined from the door of his room.

"We just have a couple more things and then we're out of here." I spoke with fake enthusiasm to try and get him motivated but it didn't work.

"I want to stay with dad. I don't want to go to LA." He pouted.

I knelt down next to him and got to his eye level, "Hey, look at me." I spoke softly, "We are going to go to California and have a great time. It's so much better than Chicago. It's warm all the time and they have Disneyland. We will have so much fun. I promise."

"Why can't dad come with us?" He cried.

Because your dad used to scare the hell out of me.

No, I couldn't say that.

Brett Williams was my ex-husband and father of Sam. To his son, Brett was the best dad in the entire world and would never lay a hand on him, but to me, Brett was a nightmare. He got ticked off at the slightest things, and laid into me for not having the house cleaned, or not making chicken for dinner. The abuse was mostly verbal and only turned physical once, but that was enough for me.

Sam never knew of the horrible things his father used to say to me, because I didn't want him to think of his dad as a bad man. He looked up to him and I had to admit, Brett was a good father, just a bad husband.

I don't know how we kept the yelling from Sam for all this time, but he never knew anything other than the fact that daddy and mommy used to fight. He would hear me crying sometimes but I never told him why. I just made something up to placate him.

I thought there would be a huge custody battle for Sam, but Brett didn't put up a fight. He was more than willing to give me full custody with limited visitation although I could see the sadness in his eyes as he signed the papers.

Brett and I had been married for six years before I couldn't take it anymore. I walked out with a two year old Sam in my arms and stayed with my mother Clarissa on the other side of Chicago. Brett was the big CEO type and had money coming out of his ass but I couldn't care less. I just had to get out before I ended up dead or he hurt Sam. We separated for three years before I finally just went ahead and served him with divorce papers. It wasn't like we were going to get any better so I bit the bullet.

My dad was furious and being a police officer, he thought that he could pin some things on Brett, but Brett ruled half of Chicago and held the city in his palms. No charges were ever pressed and he was never brought before a judge even though there was a massive amount of evidence of abuse against him.

The horrible thing about all this was that Sam resented me for taking him away from his father, because he didn't understand what I went through. To him, his father was a god who took him out for ice cream and played football with him, but I knew better. On the outside, Brett was the perfect man and all my friends thought I was crazy for leaving, but I wasn't going to tell them the way he treated me. They wouldn't believe me anyways.