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The betrayal hurt so badly she couldn’t breathe. She read the rest of the story and then let the magazine fall from her hands.
The pain she’d been holding at bay for months, years, roared to life, sucking her into the bleakest, loneliest place she’d ever been. For the first time, she couldn’t even imagine crawling out of this pit.
She staggered to her feet, her vision blurred by tears, and reached for her car keys.
She couldn’t live like this anymore.
Two
September 3, 2010
4:16 A. M.
Where am I?
What happened?
I take shallow breaths and try to move, but I can’t make my body work, not my fingers or my hands.
I open my eyes at last. They feel gritty. My throat is so dry I can’t swallow.
It is dark.
There is someone in here with me. Or something. It makes a banging sound, hammers falling on steel. The vibrations rattle up my spine, lodge in my teeth, give me a headache.
The sound—crunching, grinding metal—is everywhere; outside of me, in the air, beside me, inside of me.
Bang-scrape, bang-scrape.
Pain.
I feel it all at once.
Excruciating, exquisite. Once I am aware of it, of feeling it, there’s nothing else.
* * *
Pain wakens me: a searing, gnawing agony in my head, a throbbing in my arm. Something inside me is definitely broken. I try to move, but it hurts so much I pass out. When I wake up, I try again, breathing hard, air rattling in my lungs. I can smell my own blood, feel it running down my neck.
Help me, I try to say, but the darkness swallows my feeble intent.
OPENYOUREYES.
I hear the command, a voice, and relief overwhelms me. I am not alone.
OPENYOUREYES.
I can’t. Nothing works.
SHESALIVE.
More words, yelled this time.
LIESTILL.
The darkness shifts around me, changes, and pain explodes again. A noise—part buzz saw on cedar, part child screaming—is all around me. In my darkness, light sparks like fireflies and something about that image makes me sad. And tired.
ONETWOTHREELIFT.
