Page 81 of Since She's Been Gone

The man sitting next to me isn’t Paul.

“Paul’s phone and house keys were stolen at the airport before he got on the plane last night,” he says. “Your boyfriend has been texting me.”

Fuck, fuck, fuck!

Where is he taking me? Whoishe? He must work for the Cadells …

God, I’ve been so stupid.

Everything this impostor told me today has been a lie. His story about being a gay bullied teenager, how Eddie invited him back home during their college breaks … I wonder how he found out they were roommates—probablythrough reading some of Eddie and Paul’s old text messages on Paul’s phone.

That’s why there weren’t any pictures of Anthony and Paul at the house. This guy probably hid them, so I wouldn’t know he wasn’t Paul. He only left out pictures of their dog that he said died. But the dog’s probably alive and in a kennel somewhere since Paul and Anthony are in North Carolina.

And all day this impostor has been tracking my movements, probably trying to see if I was communicating with Mom. He must work for the Cadells.

“Who are you?” I ask, panicked, my voice cracking, my dry throat struggling to produce words.

Suddenly all of the car doors lock. I look out the window and realize we’re well past the well-lit part of DC, driving through a dark, desolate area without lights.

“Where are you taking me?!” I shout.

The driver violently pulls over to the side of the road and turns the car off.

The man next to me grabs my wrists, squeezing them hard, and looks me right in the eyes. “Shut up,” he says.

The driver turns the engine back on, and the car starts moving again.

I sit quietly, shaking in place. I’m being kidnapped.

But unlike when I was fifteen years old and abducted in the Santa Monica mountains by the ninja men who returned me to Better Horizons, this time, I won’t be returned. I know that, deep in my bones.

I wonder if, by now, Eddie knows he’s been communicating with a fraud. He must be so worried.

And then I have the most terrible thought of all—what if the agent that Paul dispatched to Eddie’s house to protect Sarah and him wasn’t sent by Paul and sent by the man sitting next to me?

I turn to the man to plead with him. “I was trying to find out if my mom was still alive because I realized I was beingfollowed and thought the fastest way to get you guys to stop was to tell her she needed to disappear again if she was. I have no other motive. I just want to be able to return to my life. Please let me go. I won’t look for her anymore. I promise.”

“We gave you an off-ramp on the airplane with the text. You didn’t take it. Now you know too much. Can’t have loose ends running around,” he says, his voice dripping with acid.

I think about Mom, how she fled decades ago to protect me from whatever this is, how Dad tried too, keeping her past a secret from me until the day he died, the burden it must have been for him. And how in the end, none of it was enough; it all still caught up with me.

I start to cry.

I think about Eddie and Sarah. How much I love them. How worried I was that I wouldn’t measure up as a mom to her, convinced I didn’t deserve to be one because of what happened in my first marriage. And now I want that chance more than anything.

“Do you have a family?” I ask the impostor between sobs. He doesn’t respond. “Because there’s a seven-year-old girl who needs me. I’m the closest thing to a mother she’s had since her mom died. I beg you, for her sake, to please let me go.”

He turns to me, about to say something, when the car hits something in the road, making it swerve out of control. He’s thrown against the side door. His shoulder bangs into it. I grab onto the seat in front of me, trying to stop myself from being tossed around, squeezing my eyes shut, too terrified to watch what’s coming next.

“What the fuck!?” the driver shouts, trying to regain control of the car, which keeps spinning. After a few donuts, it finally stops. The driver turns off the engine and immediately gets out.

I look out the window and watch him walk around the car, inspecting it. I turn to the man next to me, who, despite being thrown around, is still clutching my phone.

I consider whether I should try to grab it from him, but he’s stronger than me, and so is the driver. They’d wrestle it away before I could try and make a call, assuming there’s even reception here. We’re in the middle of nowhere.

Every article I’ve read about what you should do if you’re kidnapped says you must never let the kidnappers take you to another location because there’s much less of a chance of survival if they do. I need to do whatever I can to break free before they take me anywhere else, even if it means jumping out of a moving car and rolling onto a highway. The problem is there’s nothing around here, so even if I try to make a run for it, there are no people who could come to my rescue.

The driver opens the front door and returns to his seat. “Some asshole dropped a box of three-inch nails. One of my tires is almost completely flat,” he says.

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