Tara walked over and stood silently. She didn’t dare intervene.

“Can you tell me what happened?” Warren asked.

“It’s just my face,” she said between sobs. “We were just fighting and…” Her crying intensified as she reached toward her forehead, trying to feel the extent to her injury. “He hit me and I hit the coffee table,” she added.

“We have an ambulance on their way. They’ll take a look at that for you.”

The woman nodded.

“How do you know him?” Warren then questioned.

The woman’s eyes moved from Warren to the car, where the man was peering through the window.

“Don’t worry about him,” Warren added. “He can’t hurt you now.”

The woman sighed. “We’ve been dating for a few months,” she replied as she looked from Warren to Tara. “I know he’s married,” she admitted. “He said they were done, that he was leaving her.” She started to weep again at her words. She had answered a question that Warren hadn’t even asked, but it weighed too heavily on her conscience.

“Has he been violent with you before?”

She looked toward the man in the corner of her eye and lowered her voice.

“He’d grabbed me a few times, but he only hit me once before this. He promised he wouldn’t do it again.” She touched her injured forehead once more.

Sirens echoed off the trees as the ambulance approached, but Warren had one more question. He had been holding the victims’ pictures in his hand, and he held them out to her.

“Have you ever seen any of these people before?” he asked.

She took them in her hand and peered at each one. “No, I haven’t,” she said with certainty.

The ambulance then pulled into the driveway and an EMT stepped out and approached the porch. Warren thanked the woman and then briefly filled in the EMT, who began attending to the woman’s wound.

Warren walked off to the side of the porch. Tara followed, bracing herself for whatever he was about to say to her.

He looked at her for a moment with sheer disappointment in his eyes, a silence lurking awkwardly between them. He was giving her a chance to speak first, but at the realization, Tara’s palms began to sweat—her face reddening—because she had no words to describe what happened to her.

She knew it was a panic attack. That much was obvious to even Warren, but the cause of it was so much deeper. It bubbled up from a layer of herself she had always tried so hard to conceal. But she knew she couldn’t tell him. She would look weak, damaged, which she already did, and without the strength to speak of it, she could only remain silent.

Warren waited a moment longer but then sighed.

“I’m going to take a look inside,” he said. “You should probably come too.”

Tara knew she had let him down once again and it sat like a rock in her stomach.

She followed behind him as they entered the cabin. They searched in silence as Tara tried to think of any way to explain her actions. She knew she messed up. It was a fear she always had, that her demons would somehow trickle into her present-day life, disabling her at her job. They had already trickled into her subconscious when she slept, but this was a new layer of it all. It affected her job. It was her worst fear coming to life.