as she examined the scars, knowing that while some were old enough to have healed, others were fresh. “I can take you there tonight, if you want. You can walk away and start a new life. You never have to come back here, not ever. You’ll have to show what he did to you to a few other people, but I’ll be there with you when you do. Do you think you can do that?”
The girl nodded, still staring intently at her feet.
“Do you want to go with me now?” Maggie asked more gently.
The girl nodded again.
“I’ll come upstairs with you while you pack,” Maggie told her. “We’ll take everything you want to take. I won’t let Elena stop you.”
The girl looked up, alarmed, at the mention of her stepmother’s name. “Elena will let me go with you, but she’ll never leave herself,” Sarah said with childish wisdom. “She’s afraid to go. But if she stays here, he’ll hurt her when he comes home. He’ll punish her for my leaving.”
Sarah Hayes looked to Morty for her salvation. She could not live with leaving, not if Elena’s pain was her legacy.
“I’ll stay with your stepmother tonight,” Morty said, his hand unconsciously touching his gun. “I’ll stay here for as long as I need to. I promise. I’ll stay until they take him away.”
“When will that be?” she whispered.
“Soon,” Maggie promised. “Very soon. We will come to get him soon.”
Sarah Hayes looked away, hiding her tears of relief. And I understood that, though Elena Hayes had treated her as little more than a stranger, perhaps even as her competition for survival, this beautiful, beautiful young girl had not been able to simply walk away and leave her stepmother to a terrible fate. I knew then that she would be okay in the world. I knew that, whatever happened next, Sarah Hayes would survive.
Sarah’s sister knew it, too. When I looked up, Alissa Hayes had vanished.
I would never see her again.
Chapter 24
I have come to understand, in my brief otherworldly existence, that humans have the capacity to bind themselves to one another and that, in doing so, they can become so much more than they could ever be by themselves. I did not understand the dynamics fully, only enough to know that I had missed out on something powerful and profound by not opening my heart to others when I was alive. I first realized this a few months after my death. It was spring and this dead man’s fancy had turned to love. So I took to standing in the park, grappling with my loneliness, watching lovers walk hand in hand and families playing on the lawn. I witnessed how love can strengthen, brighten, and sharpen the very core of our existence, changing it forever. I came to understand that love is a permanent strengthening of the spirit, a gift that lingered long after the love itself was gone.
Even so, I was moved that Alissa’s love for her sister had driven her to put off the easing of her earthly pain so that she could warn me of the danger to Sarah. And I was moved by a more anonymous love I witnessed when Sarah was delivered into the care of strangers whose job it was to repair the damage done by those who used the need to love as a weapon against their own children.
The woman who welcomed Sarah into her foster home had seen it all before. Her heart was hidden beneath a veneer of efficiency, but only because it had been broken too many times to count by the stories she’d heard from the children who passed through her life. She remained a loving woman, despite the overwhelming evidence she’d seen of man’s cruelty. She had felt Sarah’s fear at once, understood her pain, and welcomed her into the safety of a temporary home. I knew Sarah would be okay in the sprawling, life-filled house crammed with toys and chaos. She could begin her new life here.
Maggie was reluctant to leave her. She waited with Sarah in the front room of the foster home until the social worker could arrive, asking gentle questions about the most ordinary of topics—school—in order to help Sarah create the illusion she would need to survive: the illusion that normalcy was possible.
It was close to midnight by the time Maggie left. As she drove through the dark streets, I felt her mind switch directions and she homed in on Alan Hayes. All empathy vanished