Rachel took a shaky step forward, arms wrapped tightly around herself like she still lived somewhere cold, somewhere survival meant making yourself smaller.
“You told them I was dead.”
My mother broke into tears.
“No,” I said quietly, staring at Rachel. “They told me you were dead.”
Rachel looked at me as if I had struck her.
“What?”
My father dragged both hands over his face. “This is not the time.”
“No,” I snapped. “This is exactly the time.”
Rachel’s face had changed in fifteen years. Of course it had. She looked older than thirty-three, as if every missing year had carved itself into her features one night at a time. A pale scar cut through her eyebrow. Another traced her jaw.
She drew one thin breath after another and then began speaking, the words coming like they had been trapped too long.
“I was sixteen,” she whispered. “He took me from the church parking lot after choir practice. He showed me his badge and said there’d been an accident, that Mom needed me downtown.”
Her voice shook so badly the last word nearly disappeared.
“I believed him.”
Noah had stopped halfway down the stairs now. He was hearing everything. I should have sent him away. I should have done a thousand things differently. But I stood there unable to move.
Rachel kept going.
“He kept me in different places. Cabins. Motels. Basements. Always moving. Always saying Dad was helping him. That Dad knew where I was. That no one was coming.”
I turned, slowly, toward my father.
He didn’t deny it quickly enough.
My mother let out a sound I had never heard from another person. It wasn’t a scream. It wasn’t a sob. It was something deeper—something torn straight out of disbelief.
“Tell her she’s lying, Daniel.”
For one disoriented second, my mind didn’t understand what I’d heard.
Then I did.
