inside told her to move away. The door closed behind her.
“We’ve never talked about it,” he said. “Not really.”
“About what?”
But she understood. It always lingered in the air between them. That summer afternoon when the world changed.
“About what happened to us. I never told you the details.”
“No,” she said. That complicated swell of feelings—a sick fear, shame, anger—it all rose up from her belly into her throat.
“What happened to Tess, to me,” he said. “At Kreskey’s house.”
“I read the transcripts,” she said, sitting at the rickety kitchen table where he studied. “Not then. But later.”
They’d each given their testimony in chambers, just the attorneys, their parents, the judge. They were spared the courtroom; the media largely left them alone. Hank’s family left town shortly after. Rain’s family stayed. When she returned to school she felt embraced, people were kind—teachers, even the other children.
Eventually, what had happened became a kind of folklore, a ghost story—for everyone else. She became a character in a story that might have happened, or maybe not. Unbelievably, as the years passed it faded for her, as well. That day in the woods took on the gauzy quality of a nightmare. There were the scars, the dreams from which she woke screaming, the anxiety she felt around strange men, her strong attachment to her mother—she never went to another sleepover after that. But over years, with therapy, with the help of her parents, she recovered. She moved forward. There was guilt in that truth, too. She lived her life while Tess could not.
The years passed. By high school, kids were sneaking out to the abandoned Kreskey property, claiming it was haunted by the ghosts of the parents who’d abused and tortured him there. They’d died from carbon monoxide poisoning, an “accident” that almost killed Kreskey, too. If only.
Hank sat. “I want to tell you.”
She shifted back from him. Everything about him was off, his expression, his body language. Wrapping her arms around her middle, she nodded. She owed him, didn’t she? To hear his story, from his own mouth.
She was weeping by the time he was done. They both were.
He brought her back there with him—what he saw, what Kreskey did to Tess, Hank’s battle with Wolf, the inside of the house. It wasn’t a nightmare. A thing that might never have happened. She could hear and smell and taste that day—Tess screaming, the blood in her own mouth, the sound of the dog, the scent of rot from the tree where she hid, the wet leaves, how the gloaming settled, and she couldn’t move.
The look on Hank’s face, the anger, the hatred, the blame—everything she imagined in her grimmest suspicions of how he must feel about her—was there.
“I am sorry,” she said, shivering. “I was a—child. I was in shock.”
“We were all children,” he said.
She got up from her seat and began to move, still facing him, back toward the door.
“He’s going to be released, Lara. Did you know that?” he said. “I got a call today from Detective Harper.”
She had known Kreskey’s release was a possibility, that it might happen that year. But no, no one had told her that Eugene Kreskey was about to be released. A chill moved through her, drained her of energy. She leaned against the wall.
“Do you ever think about it?” he asked. “Do you ever wonder about who lives and who dies and why?”
She didn’t say anything.
“Who makes those decisions?
“He came for you,” he went on into her stunned silence. “Why did he get Tess instead?”
“I don’t have the answer to that.”
“Was it because you were stronger? Because you fought, and she didn’t?”
“It’s all so complicated,” she said. The images came back. The bridge—how Tess wanted to cross through the woods, and Rain had her mother’s warning in her head. How she gave in out of sheer laziness. Kreskey by the creek. Wolf. “Those moments are a blur. But we both fought, and we lost. He would have taken both of us. Except you showed up.”
“And then he got me instead.”
His gaze was relentless. She felt small and ashamed before him. She knew what Kreskey did to him; she’d seen the scars on his body, touched them with her hands.
“I don’t remember how things unfolded.” Her voice was just a whisper. How many hours had she spent in therapy, working through that day. But there it was, alive and well, a hollow within her. “How I got away.”
“What were you thinking when you watched him drag us away?”