Inhale.
I look down to realise I’m wearing a clean T-shirt. There’s no mud from where I fell, just little scratches and bruises littering my legs. How long have I been unconscious for? And what did Jack do to me while I was out? Without thinking, I try to move my hands to feel between my legs – check for torn flesh, blood, pain – any sign that he has put himself inside me, but my restraints don’t allow for more than a couple of inches of movement.
He’s changed my clothes. He’s held my naked, unconscious body in his hands. He’s cleaned my skin. My stomach churns. Panic starts to snip the thread of calm I am clutching. I drag air down into my lungs, and fight to stay in control. Holding still, I mentally check myself over. I’m not sore but then, what about all those women you read about who black out, are raped, and wake up having no idea until they turn over and see an unfamiliar man beside them or, further down the line, a degrading video or photograph emerges? If Jack had raped me, would I even know?
Sweat gathers in the hollow of my back as I realise, even if he hasn’t done so already, he still could. I am half naked and chained to a bed. No one knows I am here. No one will ever know I am here because I helped him commit the perfect crime. He made sure he had a watertight alibi the day I disappeared: a busy London theatre, hundreds of people who can vouch for him, ticket stubs, CCTV. He could keep me in Wisteria or kill me and throw my body into the sea, and no one would ever suspect Jack Westwood because he is the devoted best friend who appealed for my safe return on national television.
Panic finally severing my thread of calm, I scream for help. The nearest neighbours are too far away to hear but I don’t care, I am trying to purge myself of terror. Let it out along with all the air in my lungs. The bedroom door swings open. Jack, in joggers and a clean T-shirt, doesn’t look like a kidnapper, a murderer or a rapist. Not like the thuggish red faces you see in mugshots on the evening news. Even as a child, you’re conditioned to believe villains have warts and crooked noses where heroes have white smiles and strong jaws. Jack is good-looking and golden; even without the perfect alibi, no one would suspect him.
I’ve stopped screaming. In the abrupt silence, I hear waves crashing outside, and Jack breathing hard, and myself breathing harder. He stares at me, his face pale, contorted. With worry? Or anger, maybe. For several slow-ticking seconds I don’t know what he’s going to do, whether he will climb on top of me, inside me, finish what he started. But then he softens, and approaches, arms raised, palms up, as though trying to calm a rabid animal. ‘It’s okay,’ he soothes, ‘you’re okay.’
His hair is a wilderness of short, unbrushed curls, and there’s a red mark around his eye which I can see will turn into a bruise. I got in one decent punch, I suppose. It doesn’t make me feel good. Days ago, I couldn’t have imagined a world where I’d have to hit Jack. The bruise is a mark of reality, a visible reminder of what happened on the hill.
He drags the green armchair from the reading nook and positions it beside the bed, far enough away I can’t kick out at him with my unbound legs. I am barely breathing, waiting for him to speak. ‘I’m sorry things got out of hand.’
I blink, trying to absorb his words but they jumble and tangle and knot in my brain. ‘Out of hand?’ I echo, because he can’t possibly dismiss what he tried to do to me with such nonchalance. ‘You tried to rape me.’ When I say it out loud, it’s like bursting a festering sore and watching all the anaemic yellow pus ooze out. It is painful and ugly, but it’s the truth. It’s the truth so I say it again: ‘You tried to rape me.’
‘No. I tried to make you see—’
‘You tried to rape me.’
He scrapes the chair back and comes over to me.
‘Elodie—’
‘You tried to rape me.’
‘Stop. Listen to me. I—’
‘You tried to rape me.’
‘Shut up!’ He grabs my face, hard. ‘Shut up! Just, fucking shut up.’ With each word he gives my head a quick, hard shake. He lets me go. ‘You wanted me last night. You wanted me this morning. We couldn’t keep our hands off each other. I thought if we – I thought if you remembered how good it was, that you wouldn’t want to leave.’
‘Just because I said yes last night, or this morning, it doesn’t mean you get an automatic pass.’
‘I know.’
I open my mouth to tell him I loathe him, but a sob breaks free. Then another and another. ‘Please let me go. Please, please, please.’ I hate that I am begging but I am petrified and desperate and don’t care that my face is damp with snot and tears.
‘If I let you go now, I lose you.’
‘You lost me the second I told you to stop and you didn’t.’
‘No. No.’ He turns and kicks the chair. ‘Up here, away from everyone else, you realised you love me. Give it time, you’ll get there again. I know you, Elodie.’
‘I don’t know you.’
‘You know me better than anyone.’
I twist and pull on my restraints; they slice into my wrists. I want the use of my hands, I want to be able to fight him off, shove against his chest, swing a fist if he tries to force himself on me again.
‘Stop,’ he warns so furiously, I do as he says. ‘If you keep pulling, you’re going to hurt yourself.’
‘Does it matter?’
‘Of course it matters.’
‘You’re hurting me by locking me up in this house. Let me go, Jack. You can’t keep me here. It won’t make anything better.’
‘It will. It did.’ He paces back and forth. I’m not sure if he is talking to me or himself. ‘I don’t care how long it takes, weeks, months, years.’
My insides plummet. Years? He can’t keep me here for years. Oh, but he can, can’t he? How would anyone ever know? Running through my head is a newspaper reel of all those stories of girls trapped in basement rooms, only to be discovered years or even decades after being taken.
‘We’re meant to be. I know it. It’s me and you. It’s us.’ He stops pacing and stands in front of the French doors, the same ones we sat in front of to watch the storm, and I ached to kiss him.
He pushes his fingers back through his hair. Then spins on his heel and strides towards me. I scramble back, pushing myself against the headboard, trying to put as much distance between him and me as possible. ‘I love you,’ he tells me.
I’m silent.
‘Jesus, the way you’re looking at me. Like I’m a fucking monster. Just how Jeffrey used to look at me.’ He whips away so all I can see is his back. ‘Maybe I deserved the beatings, the nights spent in that basement. When I was a kid, he told me my mother was too soft to abort me when she should’ve and so we all had to suffer her weakness. He was right.’ His voice is delicate, cold, like the thin layer of ice over a puddle on a frosty morning. A childhood stained with violence changes a person. Moulds them. ‘It should’ve been me with a gun to my head that summer.’