He lets out a morose laugh. “Seriously. The law? I just want you to know that you and your partner are wrong about me. I should have told you. But I didn’t. I was in treatment the day before that woman went missing. I didn’t get home until the morning you came to shit on me.”

“You really should have told us.”

“Right. Well, I’m telling you now. Not that it matters. I don’t have a job. I don’t have a reputation, and pretty soon I’m going to be done.”

“You need to come in,” I say.

Silence fills my ear.

“You need to make sure my dog is okay.”

And with that, Jim Coyle hangs up. The word incident continues to reverberate. It’s a familiar euphemism, well known by me and my family.

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

LEE

People used to ask me about what happened when I was a girl, and I always said that I didn’t remember much of the “incident”—again, my mother’s word. I explain it in a way that suggests memory loss due to trauma. For most, that’s acceptable. I wish it were that simple.

The truth is that I remember nearly every minute of my ordeal with Albert Hodge.

That morning stays in my head like a graphic novel, images telling the story in bold swaths of black and white with smudges of jolting color roaring out of the lines. My point of view shifts from what I saw as my attacker undid his pants and forced his way inside me to how I know I must have looked to him. I see my face frozen in fear. I rise above the scene and watch everything like a detached observer.

It isn’t happening to me.

Yet it did.

Thinking and dreaming of what happened is a far different experience than giving voice to events that haunt you. You cry when you tell someone something. You shake. You get sick. You seek comfort. When you don’t speak about it and just think it, you don’t fall apart.