Chapter 45
Chloe automatically put the clothes she’d been wearing the night before into a laundry bag. She was not going to wash them and had yet to decide what to do.
She took photos of her bruises with her phone camera.
Mainly her arms and ribs. She found no evidence that her jeans or underwear had been removed and no bruises down there.
One consolation in an otherwise traumatic experience.
She didn’t feel like she had been drugged, so maybe it was the shock that had caused her to pass out and prevent him from going further. It had to be that.
She welcomed the cold shower before switching it to hot, and washed and scrubbed every inch of her body.
It was wrong to do this if she wanted to pursue McKeown for his assault, but she couldn’t stand the feel of him on her body any longer.
She had to shed him like a snake skin. And Sam McKeown was a fucking snake.
Numb, she wrapped herself in a soft bath towel. Sitting on her narrow bed, she opened the crime-scene photos. Maybe these would help her to focus. However, they instantly brought her back to the whoosh of the AirDrop from his phone the evening before. She slapped the phone face-down on the bed.
She had to tell someone about the assault, but who could she trust? She wasn’t close enough to any of her classmates, and she wished she was back working in Fallon’s Bar in Ragmullin. A fleeting thought, because Templemore was where she wanted to be. She was going to be a guard.
Picking up the phone again, she saved the photos to a new album. She caught sight of another album. Grace Boyd’s wedding in June. And that was when she knew who she could ask for help.
She realised her mother would go totally bananas if she found out Chloe had gone behind her back before telling her. But could she tell Lottie what had happened, and over the phone? She wasn’t at all sure.