I spoke, I could see it all as clearly as though I were suspended above a bed at the farmhouse. The terrified girl in the room was someone else. Not me. She floated like an impotent ghost. She lay on one bed with a tall man who smelled of garlic. She bowed at another bed for Chadlow, her feet on the floor, her arms pressed against the mattress. She was just a child, really, who collapsed from pain, only to be hoisted up by her mother. Night after night the men came, and the gentle ones were the worst, for they assumed they could coax life into a girl who died each night before they even
...more
