the story I’m telling. As I remember again and again that it isn’t a story at all. It’s the truth. It’s my life.
“I’m going to tell the police,” I assure them when I’m done. Though maybe I’m assuring myself. On the way here, I was desperate to call them because I figured Ted still had Astrid. But now that I know he doesn’t, I feel a twinge in my stomach, picturing him limp and alone behind bars.
How could you do this to me? I can hear him asking.
But that’s my question. To him. And it’s one I will probably be wondering until the day I die.
“It doesn’t matter that he’s my dad,” I say. “He deserves to go to prison.”
Rita and Astrid are mirror images of each other: mouths slightly open, brows furrowed with horror as they try to understand. And when they speak, they mirror each other as well.
“No!” they both say.
“What?”
“No,” Rita repeats. “You can’t go to the police.”
I gape at her. “Why not?”
She said the same thing on the phone, but sitting here with Astrid, who was not a victim this time, but certainly once was, I can’t understand why they wouldn’t leap at the chance to put the man—the monster—my father—behind bars.
“It’ll ruin our reentry plan,” Rita says.
“Reentry plan?”
“We’re gonna re-create the way Astrid was returned twenty years ago. She’s gonna be found in town, blindfolded and sedated. She’s not gonna know anything about her abductor, of course, just that he was wearing the same thing as last time, and that he kept her in a basement again.”
I flick my eyes back and forth between the two of them. “But—”
“Please,” Astrid says. “Please don’t report your father.”
She wipes the tears off my face, closes her eyes, and presses her forehead to mine. Her skin nearly singes me, but I let her do it.
“God, I can’t believe he did that to you,” she says. “I’m— I don’t even know what to say. It’s so horrifying. And disgusting. It doesn’t even seem real to me. He’s always been this faceless person. This guy that… might come back for me someday. God, I’ve spent most of my life in therapy, I’ve paid for state-of-the-art alarm systems even when I could barely afford rent. But all this time, he was your…”
She trails off, and I know it’s because she’s still trying to understand.
“It doesn’t even seem like something a parent could do,” she adds.
Now she pulls away a couple inches, but locks her eyes onto mine. They’re so green, they look fake. Like some fairy-tale potion. Or poison.
“You and I,” she says, “we’ve both gone through so much. But this is a way for me to have the life I want. If you call the police, our plan will fall apart. They’ll know I wasn’t taken by the same man as last time. I mean… maybe it could be a copycat, but…”
She looks at Rita, who shakes her head.
“No,” Astrid says. “It would still invite too many questions. And people are already starting to doubt me. I know what they’re saying out there, now that they’ve all read the book. I’ve seen the stories online, reporting from Foster no less. They’re skeptical. They think I might have brought this on myself somehow. Like the first time.”
“You didn’t bring it on yourself,” Rita says. Her words sound flat. Like she’s said them many times before. “You were a kid. You know that.”
Astrid nods. “I do. But I really thought I had,” she says to me, “when I was in the basement. And I’ve certainly had moments in the years since, really dark moments where I—” She cuts herself off. Shakes her head. “The bottom line is—we need everyone to believe that the person who took me now is the same one who took me before. The same one who was totally untraceable. If people have reason to doubt that—if the police have reason to doubt that—then we, Rita and I, we could go to prison.” She takes my hand. Squeezes it twice. “All we’re trying to do is be parents.”
Her pleas sink inside me. Heavy as an anchor. All we’re trying to do is be parents. I can almost hear the exact same sentence coming from Ted’s mouth, with just a few amendments. All I’m trying to do is work.
“Say you won’t tell,” Astrid begs. “Say you’ll be the same sweet girl you always were in the basement. Say we can trust you. We can, Lily—right?”