Chapter 42 Sophie
FORTY-TWO
SOPHIE
As if in a trance, I walk toward the red brick house because I don’t know where else to go. I open the door, enter the building, and stop in front of a high table behind which a young man is sitting.
"How can I help you?"
His voice sounds wrong, so terribly wrong…
"I’m Sophie Reed." My voice sounds wrong too, but I force myself to keep talking anyway. "I ran away from home a week ago."
There are people everywhere. They talk to me. They touch me. Hold my hand, speak soothing words to me, tell me everything is going to be okay. They ask where I’ve been. What happened. Whether someone did something to me.
I don’t know. Nothing. No.
I can’t say any more. Because no matter how much my heart aches, I couldn’t betray him. He didn’t do anything to me. He only shook my world, made me fly, let me fall, gave me everything, and then tore it away from me in the cruelest of ways.
"You can tell us anything. Nothing will happen to you, darling," says one of the officers in a soft voice.
Darling.
It’s the wrong voice. Every voice is wrong. No one sounds like him, so I eventually tune everything out.
My mother is crying when she enters the police station. She pulls me into her arms, then pushes me away again to examine me. She asks what happened to my hair, where I got the clothes from, then pulls me back in. But I don’t say a word. I can only think of his voice.
Open your eyes, little darling.
The silver of his eyes is all I see. It’s everywhere. Liquid silver that swallows me whole and never lets me surface again until I’m completely lost in it.
I’m no longer here, not even as my mother leads me to her car. I sit in the passenger seat and wonder how many times I may have driven along this road with him. Was it this forest where he showed me how to shoot? Was it here that he held my hand? Was that a lie, too?
My gaze lands on the intersection with the traffic light where he always waited. I see his pickup, but it’s just an illusion. He’s not there and never will be again. He’s gone.
We enter our house, which is so different from his place. It should be warm and friendly, but I feel so terribly cold without him…
My mother won’t stop talking. She was worried about me, she says again and again. How could I do that to her, she wants to know. Where was I, she asks.
I say that I don’t know.
She takes me to my room. I lie down in this bed that smells of nothing. No leather. No tobacco. No campfire.
Sleep, she says. I love you, she adds.
Then you shouldn’t have let me run away, I think in my grief. If she had watched over me more carefully, none of this would have happened. But I don’t say the words. Because I know they’re not true. Because I know it’s my own fault.
Hours turn into days and weeks and months, while there is nothing but emptiness inside me because he’s gone.
I don’t allow myself to say his name in my mind because I tell myself it’s easier that way.
If I don’t think his name, I may eventually forget him.
If I just pretend he doesn’t exist long enough, I’ll forget the stormy-gray eyes, the raven-black hair, and the sound of his voice.
I’ll forget how it felt to be touched, kissed, and desired by him.
All lies. But they help me keep breathing even though the pain in my chest threatens to suffocate me.
I found the phone he bought me in my jeans pocket the night I got home. I turned it off and hid it under the floorboard in my room. Sometimes at night, I take it out and turn it on. I don’t know what I hope to see on its screen, but it’s never there.
When it’s really bad, I text Jules. I tell her how much I miss her, how nice it was to have a friend, and that I can’t stop thinking about him. But she never answers.
My mother watches over me with a hawk’s eye, although I only come out of my room to eat or go to the bathroom.
Talk to me, she demands again and again. You can tell me everything, she assures me.
No, I can’t. Because there is nothing left for me to say.
When she wants to know if anyone touched me and who the driver of the truck was, it hurts the most, but I don’t tell her.
After a while, she stops asking questions, and something like normality finally returns.
I help her with the herbs, and she goes to the markets in the surrounding area as usual.
When she’s gone, I take care of the house and cook, but I don’t go outside.
Sometimes I wonder if she locks the doors.
If she’s actually locking me in now, afraid I might run away once more.
But I never check. I don’t care. I don’t want to go out there at all.
I don’t want to go anywhere. There’s nothing out there that I want to see or have anymore.
The key to the old closet lies untouched in its hiding place.
I no longer want to think about the world with its adventures and friendships and love.
I would like to forget all that. And sometimes I even succeed for a tiny moment.
But as soon as I lie in bed at night, he’s haunting me through the endless minutes before sleep takes over.
Every single night, he’s in front of me.
Behind me. Above me. Inside me. It’s a bittersweet pain that fills me because he gave me so much.
He gave me everything. And then he took it all away.
Before I met him, I called the characters in the books foolish when they spoke of heartbreak. Nothing could be that bad, I always wanted to tell them. A heart can’t actually break, I told myself. No one dies of a broken heart, I used to think.
I was so wrong.
When the heart breaks, you can feel it very clearly. You feel the moment it gives out. And then you die. A little more each day.
My mother’s voice cuts through the silence between us. "We need to talk."
As I lift my head and eye her, it’s as if I don’t know her at all. When did her face become so deeply wrinkled? Has she always looked so tired? Who is this woman who calls herself my mother, but who suddenly seems like a stranger to me?
"I hear you talking in your sleep at night," she continues, not noticing my astonishment.
"What am I saying?" I ask mechanically, although I’m not really interested. Sleep is my only refuge because I don’t remember my dreams.
"What did he do to you? Did he touch you? Did he sin against you?"
I lower my fork before answering slowly and thoughtfully. "I don’t know what you’re talking about."
He kissed me. He made me feel as if I were weightless. I died beneath him and came back to life.
I think all that, but I don’t say it.
When my mother loses her composure and slaps the table with her flat hand, I don’t even bat an eye. I’ve experienced real, all-consuming rage in its purest form with him. Her outburst is nothing that could impress me anymore. It is almost ridiculous compared to what I’ve seen.
"You will tell me the name of this man right now so he’ll be punished for what he’s done!" Her voice is sharp, but to me, it’s merely a pathetic last attempt to get me to talk.
"No one has done anything to me," I reply calmly as I look back down to continue eating.
"Then what happened? Where were you? Who gave you clothes, and what happened to your hair? Something must have happened. You can’t have been nowhere for seven days."
I lift my head again and look at her as a smile settles on my lips because I realize it doesn’t matter. She won’t be able to do anything to him because she’ll never find him. Let her know what happened, though. Maybe then she’ll finally leave me alone.
"You know what, Mother?" I say softly. "You’re right. I was with a man. For the entire seven days."
Her face turns ashen.
"He showed me how to shoot a gun and play pool. He made me drive his truck."
She gives a slight shake of her head.
"I slept in his bed. He kissed me. Even touched me. Everywhere. And then he had sex with me," I tell her calmly, watching her gasp for air.
"I enjoyed it. Each. Single. Second. And you’ll never know who he is. Because this is my life."
Then I drop the fork carelessly on the plate, get up without pushing my chair back under the table, and go to my room.
For the first time since he sent me away, I feel something other than this emptiness. I feel satisfaction.
It’s cruel, but I just had to make it clear to her that she can’t decide everything anymore.
No matter how much she tries to isolate me and influence me with her strange views, she won’t be able to take away what happened between him and me.
Never. And she’ll have to live with the fact that she can’t do anything about it.
I realize how wrong I was on a Thursday.
It has been weeks since I returned to my mother because I had nowhere else to go. I’ve accepted the grief and pain as friends and live with them. But on this day, something joins them that shouldn’t be there: horror.
I’m just coming out of the bathroom when my mother positions herself in the hallway, blocking my way.
"Cole Walker will be arrested for child abduction and sexual abuse.
" It sounds as if that should make me breathe a sigh of relief. But hearing his name—after all these hours, days, and weeks—knocks the ground out from under me, so at first, I don’t understand what exactly she just said.
As if in a trance, I reach for the doorframe next to me and hold on to it because my legs are threatening to buckle. "What?"
She smooths out her dress, lifting her chin. "He’s going to prison for what he did to you."
No. This can’t be happening. They can’t…
"How?" I ask breathlessly as panic rushes through me.
The smile that spreads across my mother’s face is so cruel that I take a step back.
"I found that little hiding spot of yours while you were gone. And after you refused to tell me anything, I just had a feeling," she replies with a shrug. "I checked it again and found the phone. The police were able to determine who bought it. They’re on their way to him as we speak."
"But why did you do that?"
My mother tilts her head before answering as if I were a stupid child.
"Because he needs to be punished. He touched you, took advantage of you, and made you do things you didn’t want to do.
I told the police that you confided everything to me, but you’re far too traumatized to give your statement properly. "
Her voice sends shivers down my spine. She sounds triumphant.
"They can’t do that," I say, stunned. "He didn’t do anything."
She clicks her tongue disapprovingly, tilting her head to the other side. "Oh really? Who do you think they’ll believe? A concerned mother, or a traumatized child and a man with a criminal record?"
Iron chains—arm-thick and unbreakable—wrap around my throat and cut off my breath as she utters her last words to me before turning away, leaving me alone with this new, all-consuming horror.
"Cole Walker is going to prison."