I turn off the tiny machine. I know every word of what’s to come. I go to the refrigerator and retrieve a bottle of water. I don’t want wine. I don’t want beer. The window facing the Port Townsend Bay calls to me and I go to it, looking at a car go by on the street in front of my house. A dog running around loose. A woman with a crackly voice calling for that dog to come home.

I think of Aunt Ginger crumbling under the weight of her story. I had come unannounced and reopened a wound that had not yet healed. Not in sixteen years. I never thought about that until now. I never considered her situation. Only mine. Only Hayden’s and mine.

I watch the scene outside my window, but I only see my aunt and me, sitting in her darkened living room.

* * *

“Start,” I say to her. “Tell me everything.”

She inhales half the oxygen in the room. It’s a long pause. Not of the kind to create drama, but the kind to stoke some courage.

“Your mom said she stopped to help someone who was trying to load some things into the back of a truck. The things weren’t heavy, she told me later. Just awkward. Your mom is like that. Always helping people. When she wasn’t looking, he came from behind her and put something over her mouth. Chloroform, she thinks. It could have been something else…”

She let her words trail off. I give her a moment. Reliving whatever happened to Mom is painful.

For her.

For me.

Her words pummel me: “captive, abused, tortured.” She says that my mother was subjected to the vilest of humiliations. She says that only the sickest, most depraved mind could conceive of the things done to her. Now that she started, it all comes tumbling out, and my aunt seems to be in another, horrifying, world until her eyes focus back on mine, realizing who I am. How old I am.

I remember her staring at me with her pale, penetrating eyes. She wanted me to understand the next part, to embrace it.

“A weaker person would have folded and given up,” she says. “Courtney is the bravest girl who ever lived.”

How she could say that? Mom, brave? We’d been running all of our lives. Exactly how is hiding brave?

“How did she get away?” I ask.

“She said she was able to drug his coffee. She doesn’t even know what the pills she used were. She should have cut his throat while she had the chance. It was the biggest mistake of her life. She regretted it more than anyone could ever know. She said she was too weak to kill him, no matter what he’d done to her.”

“Why didn’t she just go to the police and have him arrested?”