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Eventually, he found you, and then he slaughtered you.
Guillermo nodded. ‘I did know her.’
‘Do you think she deserved to die?’
He frowned. ‘I didn’t even know she was alive.’
I thought back to my ill-fated pregnancy. How I’d given myself two choices – get an abortion, or run. I’d wanted that baby. A daughter. I wasn’t going to erase her. I was going torun. And then, before I could, he killed her while she was still in my womb.
‘He killed Stephanie because she took his son. He killed her because she wanted a better life for her child. He beat her until her face was . . .’ I couldn’t even think of an adequate way to describe it. Pulp, maybe. ‘Until it wasgone. It was just a mess. You couldn’t even tell who she’d been.’
‘She was a pretty girl when I knew her.’
I’m sure she was,’ I replied. I remembered Dornan’s hands on me after he’d murdered her, the way he held me down and forced himself inside me. It hurt. But him – helikedit. He was turned on by my begging. The way I fought him off excited him. That was not the man I’d fallen in love with.
‘So you’re not going to run, are you?’
Guillermo’s eyebrows were raised, the prison tattoos on his neck slick with sweat despite the AC blasting in our faces. His sudden question snapped me out of my macabre rerun of that night in the motel room, when Dornan began his systematic destruction of anything good I’d ever seen in him. The nighthe’d turned into my nightmare. The night I started to be more afraid of him than I was of his father.
The night my lover became my nightmare.
‘No,’ I said softly, tucking my long hair behind my ears. As Guillermo drove, I rested my head against the window, my throat thick, my eyes burning behind my dark sunglasses, my black clothes like magnets attracting heat. I felt like I was burning up, but inside I was so cold.
I opened my mouth, my breath hitching in my throat. Closed it again. I didn’t want to breathe in the tiny particles of bone dust that had somehow attached themselves to my shirt, to the seat I was sitting on. There was already enough death inside me without swallowing more.
‘Don’t ever pull a fucking stunt like that again, you hear me?’ Guillermo said. ‘Don’t ever change that code on me.’
‘Don’t ever change it onme,’ I shot back. ‘You know how long I was stuck in that goddamn apartment before you came along. I refuse to be trapped in there for one more minute of my life.’
Something in my words appeared to get through to him. He sagged a little in his seat. ‘Sorry.’
I don’t think he’d ever apologised to me in all these years. Suddenly I felt shame at the way I’d effectively trapped him and John inside the apartment.
‘Me too,’ I muttered.
We drove in silence for a bit. The sun was filtered by the traffic haze that always seemed to hang in Los Angeles. On the freeway at this time of day it was brutal. We sat in a crawling procession of cars, everyone poisoning the air together as we fought each other to get where we neededto be. I’d grown to hate this place. The place that had represented freedom to me as a child growing up in Colombia had inadvertently become my prison cell. I couldn’t wait to put my bare feet in the dark soil of the jungle in some lush locale in South America, or maybe it’d be white sand in some tropical paradise. Whatever, it didn’t matter, because it would be somewhere other than here.
I dared to consider John’s words from earlier. At the time I’d still been too focused on Emilio and the baby to think about what he’d been saying, but now I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
‘Can we stop at the beach on the way back?’ I asked quietly, my throat aching at the sudden exertion. Guillermo looked at me oddly, but he didn’t argue. ‘Sure,’ he grunted. ‘Why the fuck not.’
***
It was hot and crowded at the beach, but I found a small stretch of sand that wasn’t taken over by towels and kids. I didn’t even undress. I kicked off my shoes and walked into the water fully clothed, painfully aware that the remains of an infant child were now on Emilio’s desk.
I waded into the water quickly, deeper into the waves, letting my arms float away from my body, fingers outstretched. The waves helped me, dragging me deeper as they pulled back from shore. I cried. I cried for that baby. I cried for my son. I cried for Dornan. Why couldn’t he be good for me? Why couldn’t he take me away from this? Why, in saving me from Emilio’s plans to sell me all those years ago, had he brought me here, tothis?
I felt like I was losing my mind. I wondered, briefly, how hard it would be to drown myself without Guillermo saving me.
I let myself sink into the water. It felt delicious, like a balm against my skin that burned in the Californian sunshine. My Colombian skin wasn’t used to the sun anymore, and though it was still milky brown, it didn’t like being outside. A decade of closed rooms and no windows will do that to a person.
The water rushed around me, my long dark hair floating wildly in the waves. I lifted my feet from the sandy ocean floor and let myself float.
Let myself sink.
It was quiet down here. Peaceful. As peaceful as you could get when you’d just waited while a child’s body burned to cinders.
I opened my mouth and screamed silently against the safety of the waves. As loud as I could, knowing nobody would ever hear how much sorrow tore at my throat as saltwater rushed into my mouth. It made my eyes sting, but I didn’t care. In the silence and the cold, I felt so . . .free.I imagined opening my lungs and taking in a mouthful of saltwater. Just breathing it in like it was air, until it filled me up. It would hurt, no doubt. My body would try to fight it. My survival instinct would kick in.
