The Body Reader (Detective Jude Fontaine Mysteries, #1)

by Anne Frasier

She’d heard of Stockholm syndrome. She’d heard of beaten and humiliated women who didn’t leave their husbands. People talked about how they had no place to go, but she wondered if anybody ever talked about how the brain made staying okay.

It was said that those bad places, places where you’d been the most miserable—those places called to you. Maybe it was curiosity. Maybe it was simply that the bad memories were covered in a protective layer and tucked away so deep that they no longer seemed your own life but something you might have read or a movie you might have seen. So you found yourself needing to go back there to touch the place, see the place. Not to reassure yourself that it was real and that it had occurred, but to observe it from the distance of a safe mind, to marvel that this thing happened to you and you survived.

Some philosopher said the darkest place you ever live will be etched forever in your soul and you will look back on those days with a twisted sort of fondness.

She exhaled. Would she ever feel safe anywhere again? Would she always feel victimized? She picked up her phone and thought about calling Grant. Then she remembered the car across the street and put the phone aside. She couldn’t trust anybody. Only herself. And she wasn’t even sure about herself.

Uriah smiled and picked a yellow hair off his tongue.