The page ended there.
“Enough?” Jack said. I could tell he didn’t expect me to say yes and when I didn’t, he turned two pages.
This page began midline.
left the cousin, after making sure she couldn’t interfere. I went back to Nadia. I put the knife to her throat and I told her what I was going to do to her cousin. But Nadia could protect her. Just be a good girl and give me what I wanted and I’d leave her cousin alone. She was crying, big tears rolling down her cheeks, but she didn’t make a sound. I’d warned her not to make a sound and she didn’t. She was a good girl, who did as she was told, and if I said she could save her cousin by giving me what I wanted, she’d do it. So I made her take off her jeans and her panties and lie on the floor, and I put the knife at her throat and
I pushed back and scrambled to my feet. The forest seemed to pulse, growing dark and hazy, the ground beneath my feet uneven, unsteady.
“I—” I forced the words through my tight throat. “I need to walk. I—I won’t run away. I just— I’m going to walk.”
“Okay.”
I started down the path walking as best I could on ground that seemed to rise and dip under my feet. Dimly, I could hear Jack behind me, staying his distance but keeping his eye on me.
I kept walking, seeing those words again, all those words, replaying in my head.
It didn’t happen. Couldn’t have happened. I wasn’t the one he hurt. It was Amy. All Amy.
In the distance, I saw a shape through the trees. My neighbor’s run-down cabins that he’d planned to fix up to rent and never did. This spring, I’d sleepwalked into one, thinking it was the cabin, that I was back with Amy and Drew Aldrich. I’d dreamed I was on the cabin floor, free from my bonds, blood on my thighs, trying to get my panties back on, to dress and run for help.
I’d told myself I was confusing my story with Amy’s. But how many times had I had that dream? A nightmare where Aldrich told me to be quiet, told me to get undressed, made me lie on the floor, and held a knife at my throat.
Just like he’d described.
Nightmares where I tried to be still, tried to be so still and quiet, but I couldn’t, because the terror and the pain and the horror and the humiliation . . .
I fingered the paper-thin scar on my throat.
I told you to lie still.
I doubled over and threw up whatever was in my stomach. Then I stayed there, on all fours, head pounding, fingers digging into the earth. A shadow passed over me, and I looked to see Jack hunkered down beside me.
“Tell me what you need,” he said.
I shook my head.
“Tell me what I can do.”
Another shake.
“Can I stay here? With you?”
I nodded.
After a minute, he said, “I’m sorry.”
I backed up and sat down on the cold earth. “You knew. Even before you read it, you figured out what happened to me.”
Silence. Then, “Suspected.”
“No. You knew.”
He had. The pieces were all there. The nightmares. The guilt. And the scar. How the hell do you cut your neck on a fence? That’s what I’ve always said, and it’s what I believed, not because I remembered doing it, but because I remembered saying it, over and over, all my life, whenever someone noticed. I’d scaled so many fences that the exact instance seemed irrelevant. I said I cut it on a fence and my parents said I cut it on a fence, so I must have cut it on a fence.
Jack could tell the difference between a metal scrape and a knife slice.
I wanted to say, “Why didn’t you tell me?” But that was ridiculous. He’d tried. Over and over he’d suggested that my dreams meant something, and I’d flipped out every time.
This is what he thought I’d remember when I saw Aldrich. This is what he’d thought I might be better off forgetting. This is what he’d thought was in that journal.
I lurched forward and threw up again.
A minute later, he asked, “You want to talk?” I rocked back on my heels and caught my breath. I shook my head.
“Walk?”
Another shake.
“Want me to get Scout?”
Another shake, and in some deep part of me that wasn’t completely numb, I felt bad. He was fumbling to help and there was nothing he could do.
Yes, there was. He could let me collapse against him. Hold me. Offer comfort—warm, quiet comfort. But he stayed a few feet away. Giving me space. Being careful, so careful. I’d just found out I’d been raped. He wasn’t going to presume to offer any physical comfort, and I couldn’t bring myself to cross that gap and take it.
“I . . . I want to go inside,” I said. “To my room. Just be alone for a while.”
He nodded and led me back.
CHAPTER 16
I sat cross-legged on my bed and tried to process what happened twenty years ago. I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.
Buried memories? How the hell did that happen? No, really. How the fuck do you forget you were raped at thirteen? That the first time you had intercourse, it was rape. That the first time a guy touched you, it was rape.
You cannot forget that. You just can’t.
But I had, and right now, I couldn’t process how or the why. Simple acceptance was difficult enough.
Drew Aldrich had raped me.
He raped me and he hadn’t been charged with it, and I hadn’t testified to it, which meant . . .
I sucked in breath.
Just days ago, I’d told Jack that I’d almost wished I’d been hurt because then Aldrich would have gone to jail. But I had and he didn’t, because I’d told nobody.
Had I really told nobody?
I remembered the “dream”—the torn panties, the blood, the pain. Then running through the forest, never running fast enough because I couldn’t run. Because every step felt like knives ramming through me.
That part I hadn’t forgotten. I’d twisted it into something else in my memories—the pain of running too hard, of being too frightened. But it wasn’t. I’d run to town, and I’d hobbled into the station, and—
And I couldn’t remember exactly what happened next. I never could. I remembered my father’s face, his horror. I remembered yelling about Amy, get Amy, help Amy. The rest was the blur. Wiped from memory.
Given my condition when I ran inside, my father must have known I’d been raped. Maybe they’d all known, every cop who’d been there that day—my uncle, two older cousins, the other officers I’d grown up with. They’d known what had happened to me and they made a decision to bury it. To pretend it never happened.
My uncle, my cousins . . . men I’d loved. Men I’d trusted. And my father. My wonderful, perfect father.
They’d known what had happened and they’d denied it. They’d denied me the chance to deal with it and, most important, they’d denied Amy the chance for justice.
I sat on my bed for at least an hour. Then I had a bath, as hot as I could stand it. I scrubbed and I lathered and I scrubbed some more, until the water was cold and when I tried to add more hot, it blasted my raw skin like molten lava. I got out, pulled on my robe, and went to my window. I stood there, staring into the forest, until I caught a flicker of white. I looked down to see Scout about a hundred feet in. Jack was with her, sitting on a stump, the dog at his feet.
Did I think he’d go amuse himself while I suffered in private? No. Like me, he’d spent most of his life feeling guilty for things he’d done, things he hadn’t done, decisions he’d made, decisions he hadn’t made. It didn’t take much to tap into that well. He’d wrestled with this, and even if I’d forced his hand, he was going to feel guilty. Now he’d sit out there, making sure I didn’t slip out my window and hurt myself somehow.