And I will sit here all day. I will listen to nothing but this.
But there’s another sound too, stabbing its way in, cutting through the ceaseless monotone. Clack. Clack-clack. Clack-clack-clack.
I press the button to hang up, but I don’t let go of the phone. It’s stuck in my grip. Lodged in my palm. When I hear the sound again—clack-clack-clack—I find myself squeezing the plastic so hard I’m sure it will break.
Now I’m off my bed, swinging open my door, stomping down the hall. I burst into his office. But Ted keeps clacking.
As I wait for him to turn, I see myself as I once was, as I was a thousand times: a little girl, dressed in too-small clothes. She’s got a blanket trailing behind her as she watches her father’s back. His elbows jut to the sides as his fingers trot across the keys. The little girl breathes and waits and breathes. Then she coughs. Then she shifts her feet. She pinches herself, and when it doesn’t hurt worse than her heart, she begins to wonder if she’s dead—just a ghost now and nothing more—because in all that time, he doesn’t turn around.
He never, ever turned.
“Hey!” I shout.
The phone launches out of my hand. It sails through the air and lands in the center of his back.
He hunches forward at the impact, swivels around in his chair. “What the…?” he begins, but then he narrows his eyes. Examines my face. Something ripples through me, and for the first time, it isn’t fear or nausea or anxiety. It’s white-hot, scalding rage.
“The police would have followed up,” I say.
“Excuse me?”
“Two girls missing from the same area? They wouldn’t let that go.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“You never called the police, did you?” My voice sounds like somebody else’s. “You never reported my kidnapping.”
His gaze lingers on me a few seconds longer, and then he drops it. I can’t see his eyes. I don’t know if they’re filled with remorse or confusion or if they wince like a misbehaving child who’s just been caught.
But when he shifts them back up at me, I see they are none of these things. They’re just eyes. Emotionless as lenses in a microscope. Not sorry at all.
“No,” he says. “I didn’t.”
nineteen
His confirmation douses my rage. Because that’s the thing with emotions that burn so hot. You can’t sustain their heat for very long. Or, at least, I never could. My body was not built for rage. I am not the fire that gushes through a house, leaving it skeletal and charred. I am the small, quaking child who’s crouched inside, watching the beams on the ceiling for the moment they begin to fall.
I knew it already, as soon as Dixon said the report was never filed, but hearing Ted admit it, I stumble backward. When my legs bump against the interview chair, I sit down. Never mind that I told him I wouldn’t end up here. That the chair itself is as hard and uncomfortable as it ever was. I need something to catch me. A familiar place to land.
“Why?” I ask.
Ted blows out a breath. “Because the police would have only bungled the opportunity.”
He says this as if it’s answer enough, but when I don’t respond, he grunts.
“Look,” he says. “Contrary to what I told you before, I did study you in the weeks after your abduction. It’s true that, at first, I was frustrated by your memory loss. But then—” He leans forward, rolls his chair a little closer. “I realized that your dissociative amnesia wasn’t a setback; it was an opportunity. I could expand the scope of my research. Explore whether fear can be triggered even when the memory prompting it is gone. Explore what it takes to bring that memory back.”
“Triggered,” I say, my voice flat. “How?”
His eyes brighten. “I brought home newspapers with Astrid’s face on them. Read them right in front of you, but you barely reacted. Sometimes you scratched your wrist”—he looks at my hand and smiles—“exactly like you’re doing right now.”
I didn’t even know they were moving, but now my fingers stop.
“Noteworthy,” he muses, and he scoots closer to his desk, types a few words onto a page that’s nearly full.
“What else?” I ask.
For a moment, he looks reluctant to break his gaze from his typewriter. Then he stretches back in his chair, puts his hands behind his head. “You mentioned a basement,” he says, “when you first came home. And that was all over the papers, too. So