has warned me about this—hearing only the praise and missing the manipulation.
“Stop,” I say.
“Think of your memory loss as a blindfold,” he continues.
“Ted, please. Stop.”
“All you have to do is choose to take it off.”
I clench my jaw. “It’s not that easy.”
Ted sighs, rubs his face. Then he swivels away from me, toward the space to the side of his desk. A space I can’t see.
“She says it got caught,” he says, and when he spins back around, he’s holding a black bucket.
My eyes stretch wide. “What are you doing?”
“I bought this yesterday,” he explains, slapping it on its side, “to see if it could work as a trigger.”
He reaches into the bucket, pulls out a pair of black gloves. My pulse kicks, but I watch, unblinking, as he slips them on, stretching them as far as they’ll go, which is just over the cuffs of his rolled-up sleeves.
My heart pounds. My blood blares in my ears.
“Was it like this?” he asks. He stands, puts the handle of the bucket over his arm in a way that makes it catch against the end of his glove. “Fern, are you listening? Was this how it happened?”
“I don’t know,” I manage to say.
“Well, you have to try. Come on, watch. Maybe it was like this?”
He tugs on the handle, just enough so it pulls down his glove, making a gap between it and his shirt. Now there’s a small strip of skin visible on his forearm, and I rake my nails against my wrist so hard I might be cutting myself.
“She said you saw a feature of him,” he says. “What was it? And why did it scare you? Why was the sight of the arm, or whatever it might have been, even more frightening than the fact of being kidnapped itself? Why would you—” He stops. Shakes his head. “I’m sorry. I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s try to figure out what you saw first. Could it have been a freckle? Or a mole? Or… I don’t know, what else could be distinctive about an arm?”
There’s a final moment in which it doesn’t occur to me. But then I suck in air so quickly it scalds my throat.
Ted straightens. “You’re remembering.”
I look from his exposed swatch of skin—its pigment unbroken, unaltered, unmarked—up to his eyes.
“Yes,” I say. “I’m remembering.”
I’m remembering an arm that terrified me more than anything else. An arm that was used as a weapon against me. An arm that always made me scream.
And it’s only grown stronger after all these years, its muscles thickened and hardened by manual labor.
“I know where Astrid is,” I gasp, and it’s as if the invisible ropes tying me to this chair have broken loose. I leap up, run out of Ted’s office, skid into my room to grab my keys off the bed, and dart down the stairs.
“Where are you going?” Ted calls after me. I can hear him even when I burst outside, even when the screen bangs shut behind me. “We’re not done here, Fern! What is it? Where do you think she is?”
* * *
I’ve hardly put the car into park before I jump out of it, keys still dangling in the ignition.
Men who torment. Men who laugh.
The woods whisper, branches cast knife-sharp shadows, and my stomach churns—but I am going to fight through all of it, for her.
Men who were in Foster on June 24. Men whose time was unaccounted for.
Cooper’s truck isn’t parked in front of the cabin, so I shout her name as I try to barge through the front door. Only—the door won’t open. I push with all my weight before considering the life inside me, whether it sloshes around as I slam us against this wood. Then I stop, beat my fists against the door instead, panting so hard it hurts. But for all its age and rot, the door doesn’t budge.
Launching off the porch, I sprint around the side of the cabin, look for another entrance, scrape my nails against the siding as if I could claw my way inside. Around back, I find it—a screen door half off its hinges—and I crack it open just enough so I can squeeze through.
“Astrid!”
My voice bounces around the room, the echo so loud I can’t hear if she responds. There are fallen beams, chunks of plaster. The walls tilt toward each other like all they want to do is give up and cave in. But I will not let them. I will hold this house