wrong with this scene. Already the details are off. Nothing at all like the portrait he painted earlier.
She was devoted to the Word of God, he told me in that dim, narrow hallway. And she pulled me aside that day in hopes of gaining a deeper understanding of it.
But in Astrid’s memoir, Father Murphy initiated the conversation. Astrid looked at his hand on her arm as he guided her away from the party and eyed it with annoyance and suspicion. More important, she was angry at him for portraying her relationship with Bridget as some dirty, sinful mistake. She was hardly the curious, wide-eyed innocent he described. As I read her final line to him—“If hell is where the lesbians are, then I think I’d like to burn”—I can’t help but laugh. Can’t help but love her for saying exactly what she feels—and being unafraid of the consequences.
Why would Father Murphy lie to me? I know that memory distorts, rewrites. I know that the truth usually lies between the different stories we hear. But the discrepancies here are as unsettling to me as Ted’s clacking, which punches through the walls as I read. They make me wish I’d fought harder to see behind that red door at the church. Make me think of the priest’s sweating in a whole different light.
I don’t have time to follow this thought. The scene in the book is shifting, and Astrid is leaving the party. She’s walking the same streets I drove down today, and my heart knocks. There’s a car now. She hears it slowing behind her. She doesn’t look. Doesn’t know to record the color or model or license plate in her mind. I want to reach into the pages and pull her out of them. Rescue her before this horror story can start—but the chapter is ending. He’s about to “usher [her] into the dark,” a phrase too delicate for the evil thing I know has occurred.
As I flip the page to begin the next chapter, dread and anticipation weigh me down. This is where she’ll describe the man who took her. This is where I’ll know if I can trust my own mind.
Except—what’s going on? She’s already in the basement. There’s no scene where she thrashes away from her captor and begs a girl to help her. The story, like my heart, has skipped a couple beats.
Astrid wakes to find a chain attached to her foot, a mattress in the corner of a dim, cement room. I read on, barely taking in the details, searching only for a mention of the witness. My eyes race across the page—then skid to a stop.
I saw his boots first, Astrid writes, black like the rest of what he wore. Then his pants, which revealed themselves to be waders, and his rubber gloves, which stretched up his forearms. And finally, instead of a face, instead of something human and identifiable, he wore a welding mask.
My stomach feels like I’ve crested a hill on a roller coaster, and now I’m whooshing down. I read the description again to be sure, but it’s all here, every detail I remembered about the man.
No, not the man. The abductor.
I pull in a breath so sharply it feels like it cuts my lungs. Ever since I came back to Cedar, I’ve been circling around the truth. I’ve been saying if. Saying maybe. Saying might have. But it’s clear to me now that, all this time, I was only searching for confirmation of what I already knew.
Because here it seems to be, validated in black and white: I was the witness. The girl who saw everything.
Eric could tell me I’m spiraling. Dr. Lockwood could say I’ve been stuck in a groove. But I would know that I’m not. My nightmares and flashes, my time alone in Foster, this description in the memoir—it’s telling me it was all real, a memory and not a dream.
I do have a whisper of doubt, though. A tiny one. So insignificant I can barely hear it. It’s just—I flip back to the beginning of the book. Skim the prologue until I find the sentence I’m looking for. Place my finger beneath it.
She saw a feature of the man that I never did, Astrid wrote about the witness. But in my memory of the man, I can’t see his face at all. The mask is a shield.
Because the memory—it’s still only a flash. A single moment without scenery or context. In the next moment, if only