Page 96 of Hunt for You

“What’s that?” I asked suspiciously, folding my arms.

“I know that what you just told me is not the end of the story. But that it’s where most people stop when they ask you about it, or where you stop when you tell them. Because everyone thinks, well, that’s the climax right? Everything else is nothing compared to that. But that’s not true… is it?”

I blinked. “No.”

He nodded. “Okay, so… you can keep walking if you want to, or you can sit down. I want to know what happenedafterthat? When they got you away from your dad. What happenedthen?”

He backed away and sat back down at the table, still staring at me. Expectant.

I almost laughed.

What was wrong with this guy?

“It’s not a fun story,” I said hesitantly.

“Those are usually the most interesting kind,” he replied.

I frowned. “I’m not going to, like, give you some scoop for a news story or anything.”

He put up his hands again, shaking his head. “Call it… Sacred Privilege, Bridget. I give you my word that I will not speak to anyone else about what you tell me today without your express permission.”

I was going to scoff. But then I remembered the tatts, and his discomfort with the old ladies, and his comments about not fitting in that had resonated with me so much and…

And to my surprise, I didn’t want to leave.

“You better stay sitting down,” I warned him. “Because I won’t.”

“Whatever you need,” he said quietly and even though the wasn’t the first person who’d ever said those words to me, for the first time ever, looking into those eyes, I think I believed him.

33. The Rest of the Story

SOUNDTRACK:Atlanticby Sleep Token

~ BRIDGET ~

“When the police caught up with us, he shot one of them before they got him,” I said first, pacing Sam’s living room again. I couldn’t look at him while I talked about this stuff, because it always made the words freeze in my throat when people got freaked out. “Luckily the officer lived, but it added to his charges.”

I was seven. I didn’t know anything except my family, my life. My Dad had guns. The Police had guns. Ergo, men had guns.

I thought the Police were just as bad as him. So when they shot him, I screamed and tried to run. And they had to chase me down.

I thought I was being kidnapped.

It took them four hours to get a woman officer—in plain clothes—to come help with me. I didn’t know she was a Police Officer. I thought she was someone coming to help me.

She was nice, but a little cold.

She arranged for my aunt to come be with me. My aunt that I barely knew. The aunt my mother had always said was a bitch, but she was super-nice to me. She treated me nicer than any adult in my life ever had.

She let me sleep on the floor in her room every night because I always had nightmares.

She got mad that I kept crawling into her bed in the middle of the night, then wetting it, but other than that, it was pretty good for the first few months.

But I kept having to talk to the Police. They told my aunt to change my last name before I went back to school—a new school—because otherwise the kids would all want to hear my gory stories and it might retraumatize me.

Instead, all the warnings about not revealing who I was made it feel like a dirty secret. Like there was something wrong with therealme. Probably because there was.

I never made any friends at that school.

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