Page 29 of Cruel Cravings

The irony almost makes me laugh. Hopefully they don’t mind that I borrowed Stanley’s station wagon—he obviously didn’t need it anymore.

I scarf down the last bite of my burger and then toss the greasy wrapper into the trash. Starting up the station wagon’s engine, I peer into the rearview mirror. The landscape around me seems harmless and unremarkable.

Just another truck stop by the highway with a diner and gas station and parking lot for travelers to hang around in.

Nobody even glances my way. I’m a traveler like they are.

Yet I know I’m not truly alone. He’s still out there, watching, waiting.

Earlier, when passing through a different small town, I had stopped for a few minutes to go inside a sporting goods store. I needed to pick up supplies, but it felt like a risk doing so while on the run. I was quick about it, rushing inside to grab what I had in mind before stuffing the items in the back of the station wagon.

As far as I could tell, he was nowhere around. But how could I know for sure? I was operating on hope as I got back in the car and drove to this truck stop.

I shift gears into drive and pull out of the parking lot. The horizon sprawls out far ahead of me, the road humming beneath the wheels. The scenery blurs into smudges of brown and green as time ticks away.

The paranoia that once ate me alive has morphed into a numbness that’s settled my nerves. I’m no longer fighting it but embracing it. It’ll be a weapon that I can wield to my advantage. Paranoid people are cautious people. They’re observant, noticing details everyone else overlooks. They survive.

My grip tightens on the wheel and my mind spins through a number of possible scenarios. I’ve stayed alive this long. I’ve made it far outside of Easton, leading the shadow man every mile I’ve traveled.

It’s how I’ll catch him—and the Cleaver.

They’re one and the same.

It’s the only explanation that makes sense. The Cleaver is merely a moniker that authorities invented. He’s really the shadow man who has been targeting me all along. He went after my sister to force my hand.

Why else would she go missing as I was finally free? He wanted this cat and mouse game.

A twisted smile tugs at my lips.

Let him watch. Let him think he’s winning.

I’ll never give in. Not until I find my sister and we’re together again.

Dr. Wolford said I had codependency issues. He claimed I needed to stop fixating on my sister. When I demanded to know why I wasn’t receiving her letters, he said that she had never written me back.

“Your mail has been delivered, Jael,” he’d say in his flat, condescending tone. “There was nothing from your sister.”

“My sister always promised she’d write me.”

He’d tilt his head to the side almost pityingly. “I’m sorry to say, she’s yet to do that.”

Sometimes I’d freeze up, so turn up on the inside was all I could do. Other times, I was bursting with emotion. I’d scream in frustration and accuse him and the staff at the hospital of hiding my letters.

“You’re keeping them from me!” I’d yell, half rising out of my chair. “I know you’re hiding them. Give them to me! Give me my letters!”

He would shake his head and sigh, resorting to jotting down notes in my file. The pen would scratch against the paper, driving me even more insane.

I hated that pen. The way it floated across the page. The way he clenched it between his fingers as he logged more damning evidence against me…

It was how I eventually realized what I needed to do.

The only way I would ever see daylight again would be if I pretended. If I told him what he wanted to hear.

What would he think if he could see me now?

He would claim I’m having a breakdown. Another episode that required medication to dull my behavior and take away my ability to think for myself. I’d be restrained, locked up in the little room they kept me in.

Four walls and a small window that felt like its own form of a prison cell. The same place where the shadow man appeared and no one ever believed me.

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