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“Are you there? Regan?” Matty calls.
“What kind of pictures?” I ask, dread making my voice hoarse.
“From when Silk had us,” she says it with deliberate brevity.
At the mention of Weston Silk, my insides turn to water and my legs threaten to give out underneath me. I slide down the wall and land with a thud on my rump.
“How? How? Pops got rid of all of them,” I say as I stare at the floor unseeing, my fingers pinch the bridge of my nose.
“He must not have been able to. Or, maybe other people got them before he did. He was looking at them during a meeting and she was sitting right behind him. She’s worked with him for five years and that fucker has never looked at her longer than it’s taken him to complain about his coffee not being sweet enough.” Her voice breaks with angry tears and leaden weight forms in my gut. “We followed him. He went to this place all the way out by the Ship Channel. It looked like a club, but there was nothing but a neon light in the shape of a thunderbolt over the door.”
I close my eyes and take a few shuddering breaths to try and calm my racing pulse and fight back the nausea that threatens.
“Maybe it’s a coincidence?” I’m desperate for this not to be true.
“Regan. Stop. It’s not. And you know it. Go get that laptop. His office is locked but I know you have the master. I’m texting you his address. Bring it.” Then, she hangs up in my face.
I can’t even find the will to be angry with her.
This is all my fault.
When we got back to campus to start our sophomore year, our friendship was just a shell of its former self.
Jack moved off campus with her boyfriend.
Matty and I signed up to be roommates at the end of our freshman year, but I could tell when we moved in that she was having the same regrets about that as I was.
They never said it aloud, but I knew they must blame me for what happened, and I was plagued with guilt for taking them there.
We barely saw each other.
We never spoke about what happened.
One night, less than a month after we’d been back at school, we’d been working in our room with the news in the background when Matty screamed. I followed her slack jawed, wide eyed expression and turned to the television. And nearly fainted when I saw the face on the screen.
Her hair was a different color and she had two black eyes and a swollen nose but those dark brown, haunted eyes – so much like mine - were forever burned in my memory.
She was the only other person we saw while we were held at Weston’s house. When we were rescued, I begged her to come with us.
She just stared up at me with terrified eyes, tears running down her face, her lips were pressed together like she was holding back a scream. And then, one of my grandfather’s security men came and whisked me out of there. I couldn’t stop wondering what on the outside could make the hell of that house seem like a safer option than leaving.
When my grandfather told us that Weston had been killed by one of his men and that there had been no one left in the house when his team left, I told myself that she’d found a way out.
But now, she was under arrest, and was being charged with all of his crimes. Just the way my grandfather said we would be if we talked to the police.
Weston’s mother was interviewed on the broadcast. Her hair the same red as her son’s, her eyes full of malice as she talked about their son like he was the victim. “He was going places until she got her hooks into him. Now, she’ll always be a footnote on the pages of his history. Like the Jezebel she is.”
“That’s bullshit, right?” I demanded of Matty. But she didn’t even want to talk about it. She and Jack were both international students with families who sacrificed everything to send them to school. They were terrified of doing anything to jeopardize their futures.
So, I sat alone and watched the story unfold on television. And as I did, I started to fear for my future, too. But for very different reasons than my friends.
In all of the news reports about the girl in the house, they never said her name. She was always just “Weston Silk’s female accomplice.”
Soon the story ceased to be worthy of even an inch of copy space in the local papers and she dropped out of mention all together.
In the weeks following the broadcast, it wasn’t visions of the men who violated me or the terror-stricken expressions on my friends’ faces that haunted me.
It was her face, those terrified eyes of the nameless woman.
