a breath but doesn’t look surprised. “You can’t stay with Ted,” he says. “He’s been lying to you for decades. He made this so much worse than it had to be.”
“Maybe. Or maybe he was right.”
“To lie to you? How could you think that?”
“To let my brain keep protecting me,” I clarify. “Clearly what Astrid and I experienced was horrible. So horrible that it would have hurt me more to remember it back then. But now… now it’s starting to come back, and I can’t leave while it is.”
Eric bites his lip. Shakes his head.
“This is where it happened,” I continue. “This is where I was taken.” I look around the room, register the other customers for the first time in a while. “I mean, not here at The Diner,” I add quietly. “Although you never know! If it wasn’t Brennan, then for all I know, it could have been”—I gesture toward the counter, the old friend sipping coffee on one of its stools—“Rusty who took me!”
Despite everything, Eric chuckles, but it’s a dry, reluctant sound.
“If I have any hope of recovering those memories,” I say, “any hope of remembering something that can help find Astrid—it’s going to happen here. Not in Boston. Not with Dr. Lockwood.”
“But the police will—”
“The police haven’t found anything.”
A muscle jumps in Eric’s jaw. “You’re a victim, too, you know. It isn’t your job to save her.”
He’s right, maybe. In the eyes of the law, at least. I’m not qualified to find a missing woman. My heart knocks me down so easily. It takes almost nothing to turn me to stone. But look at this, Astrid said, and she pointed to a freckle that, decades later, I still recognized, still felt a pull toward, even after I’d forgotten nearly everything else about her. It’s possible that her freckle, that tiny speck of skin, had been enough to save me once. And it’s possible that a single memory, a single salvaged detail, could be enough to save her, too.
I lean forward, take a bite of my sandwich, my stomach suddenly stronger. Finally, the corned beef tastes exactly like it always did. Like heaven. Like home.
“It is my job,” I say after I swallow. “So I can’t go back. I’m sorry. Not until Astrid’s back too.”
Excerpt from Chapter Four of Behind the Red Door: A Memoir by Astrid Sullivan
He didn’t drug her. He didn’t chain her either. I don’t think she would have survived it. She was already too frightened and fragile; she couldn’t have handled another thing tethering her to that barren, bare-bulbed place.
She had ropes on her wrists when he first brought her down, but he took those off after only a few minutes. At first, I thought it was a kindness. Despite ripping her from her family, maybe he couldn’t be so cruel as to tie up such a tiny, trembling thing, or to drug someone whose body was too small to safely absorb the dose. But in the end, I think he removed the ropes only as a practicality. How else would she eat the sandwiches he gave us or hold the can of sickly sweet Sprite to her lips? How else would he keep her alive just to torture her, like he’d tortured me, with the waiting and the silence and the spotlighted red door?
She stared, unblinking, at her wrists, which were naked now, except for the rings of red around them where the ropes had chafed her skin. Meanwhile, he looked at my ankle. I imagined him squinting as he registered that the chain he’d hooked around me was the only one in that basement. It struck me then—not for the first time—that all this seemed haphazard, unplanned. Here he was, dragging another girl down into his dungeon, with no way to keep her. It made me want to laugh in his face. It made me want to roar. The only thing that kept me quiet was her. It seemed that any noise, no matter how slight, would terrorize her even more. I didn’t know, yet, that her fear was already so absolute, it had squeezed her voice right out of her throat. That the only time I’d hear her make a sound would be the very last time I saw her.
After a moment, the man seemed to give up on chaining the girl to the ground. He squatted in front of me, leaned in close, and hissed, “If you let her try to escape, I will kill her.” I pulled