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“Got a call. A girl has been found.” Sergeant Abbott waits for a beat. “She identified herself as Elizabeth Black.” At this, Chelsey does blink. Ellie Black. Alive? It’s been two years.
I’m sure Ellie will turn up. You know girls, Doug offered. They get crazy ideas and run off all the time. Chelsey’s lips twitched, hating the implication that being born female made you automatically guilty of something. Jimmy stood, his hands balling into fists. He was a big guy and kept a bat by the front door. That’s not her. That’s not my daughter. He advanced on Doug. Ellie wouldn’t just run away.
She was there, and then she was not, a butterfly dragged away in the wind.
Danny seemed nice. But it was the nice guys you had to watch out for. The mean ones, they wore their crimes on their sleeves, carting them around with all their messy emotional baggage. Nice guys buried things deep.
She’d even tracked Kat and Jim. The way they gripped their cups. Too tightly? Too casually? What kind of details did they offer? Were they too verbose or too vague?
The truth tiptoes on a thin, narrow line.
Ever since Ellie Black’s disappearance, Chelsey has volunteered for any case involving violence against women. She always has plenty of work to do. All those beaten, all those bruised, all those maimed women are welcomed on Chelsey’s shores. It is a type of atonement, Chelsey understands. She could not save Lydia. She could not solve Ellie’s case.
I’m ashamed to admit that a small, secret part of me was smug. I thought I was invincible. But then, I learned. I learned that I didn’t need shackles or chains to keep me bound. All I needed was four walls of pristine forest. And fear. The kind that festers and blisters, makes your limbs twitch. Yes. The best prisons are the ones created in our own minds.
More than anything, Chelsey wishes there was a way to know when you were experiencing the happiest moments of your life.
“In cases like these, the mind becomes a labyrinth. It’s a method of survival, I believe,” Cerise says. “Then, as patients begin to heal, their brains are more like a surrealist painting.”
The brain is always vigilant, always assessing for danger, searching for threats. But when something happens to someone, something traumatic, the brain becomes hyper-vigilant. Thinking isn’t possible.
And finally, we whispered our real names to one another, the words standing like monuments between us. Gabrielle. Elizabeth. Hannah. “If someone always remembers your name, speaks it out loud, you’re never really gone. That’s the real afterlife,” Gabby said. Then we said all the things we’d do when we were free.
