Sadly, Grace shook her head. “Oh, no. Is that what she told him? I don’t know why she is so embarrassed or… ashamed… or why she never wants to discuss it. It wasn’t her fault.”
The scar that ran from Josie’s ear down her jawline to the center of her chin burned like it was on fire. She remembered the searing pain of the knife slicing her skin the night her abductor gave her the scar. Josie’s own upbringing had been a special sort of hell. Ripped from her biological family, she was passed off as Eli Matson’s child. Eli hadn’t known any better and he had loved her so fiercely that it got him killed, leaving Josie alone with a monster. The years after Eli’s death were filled with one terror after another until Lisette finally got custody of her. In adulthood, Josie never spoke of her abuser unless she absolutely had to. “What did Amber tell you about the scar?” she managed to choke out.
“It wasn’t an accident,” said Grace. “Someone did that to her. One of them. I mean, when we first met, she gave me that camping accident story. We were roommates. I saw her once or twice without a shirt on and worked up the nerve to ask her about it. She said she was a kid and went camping with her family and fell backward into the fire. But then a couple of years later, we had come home from a night of drinking, and we got to talking. She got really sad and started crying and that’s when she told me. Someone in her family pushed her into that fire. They made her lie about it when they took her to the hospital.”
Josie tried her best to suppress the shudder that worked its way through her body, remembering her abuser’s grip on her in the hospital, insisting that she lie about what had caused the cut on her face. Beneath the table, Noah placed a warm palm on Josie’s knee. To Grace, he said, “She didn’t say who had done it? Mom, dad? Siblings?”
Grace shook her head. “She wouldn’t say, except that I got the impression that they were all there. They all knew what really happened. Which is really messed up.”
Gretchen said, “Did she ever tell you their names? Her family members?”
Grace shook her head. “No. She just said my dad, my mom, sister, brother. Oh, and there was some aunt on her dad’s side who was always around. She was a real bitch, apparently.”
As much comfort as Noah’s touch brought, Josie couldn’t stop the anxiety swelling within her. For over a year she had worked with Amber. She’d had no idea that Amber had endured something so similar to her own traumatic past. She hadn’t tried to know. Josie was always wrapped up in her work. Even her husband, bless him, had to compete with her obsession with her job. It helped that he did the same work.
“Do you think her aunt gave her the scar?” asked Noah.
Josie stood abruptly, knocking her chair back against the wall. Everyone stared at her. A flush crept up her neck. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just—I have to—can you excuse me just a moment? I’ll be right back.”
Noah and Gretchen continued to stare. Only Grace offered a smile and the words, “Of course.”
Josie tried not to sprint out of the room. She heard Grace’s next sentence trail her out the door. “I don’t know who gave her the scar… she never…”
In the stairwell, Josie stopped and took several deep breaths. Leaning against the wall, she did the breathing and meditation exercise that her therapist had taught her. It had seemed so stupid to her at first. It still did. Trying to breathe while her anxiety was at full capacity felt like trying to wrestle an alligator into a teacup. Impossible. The feelings were too big; the task too difficult. But she tried it anyway because the alternative was a nervous breakdown at work, in a stairwell, while one of her colleagues was missing and another was under suspicion. She used to be able to compartmentalize like a champion, but since her grandmother’s murder, since she’d started feeling all her feelings in therapy, it was harder.
“Stupid feelings,” she muttered to herself, doing her breathing exercise through gritted teeth. In her mind, she could hear Dr. Rosetti patiently coaching her: “Relax your jaw, Josie. Relax your facial muscles.”
The only way she could bring herself back from the brink was imagining Dr. Rosetti’s voice. It never worked with her own internal voice. That woman was too busy screaming her head off.
Once her heart rate returned to an acceptable range, she took the stairs to the second floor two at a time and snatched Amber’s diary from her desk. When she burst back into the conference room, only Grace looked up, smiling at her.
“Did she say where she grew up?” Noah was asking.
“She said they moved a couple of times a year, sometimes more. I got the sense from her that it was all very unstable. I think that’s why she was so happy here, especially after she started dating Finn. She had stability for once. She seemed happier than she’d ever been, which was really quite lovely.”
“What about ex-boyfriends?” Gretchen asked, and Josie knew she was thinking of the man that Sawyer had seen Amber struggling with on the street.
Grace waved a hand in the air. “Oh, there weren’t many. The most serious relationship she had before Finn only lasted six months and it all seemed very… passionless.”
Josie held the diary against her stomach and sat back in her chair.
“There was no one who was really hung up on her?” Noah asked. “No old boyfriends who became obsessed with her, maybe? Stalked her?”
Grace shook her head. “Oh no. Not that I’m aware of.”
Josie cleared her throat, drawing everyone’s attention. “I have something of Amber’s I was hoping you could look at.”
She put the diary on the table and slid it over to Grace. Sighing, Grace ran an index finger across its cover. “This old thing. My God. She’s still got it.”
“It’s blank,” Josie said.
“No. Not blank. It was full. Her aunt tore all the pages out of it when she was a teenager,” Grace explained.
Noah asked, “Did Amber say why?”
“‘Because she was a bitch.’ That’s what Amber said.”
“Why did she keep it all this time?” asked Gretchen.
Grace touched the golden, heart-shaped clasp. “I don’t know. Spite, maybe? Or to remind herself of what they were really like so she would never be tempted to go back?”
Josie flipped the cover open and paged to the back of the diary to the list of numbers. “Do you know what these numbers mean?”
Grace pulled it closer and studied the list. Confusion blanketed her face. “No. This is Amber’s writing, but I don’t know what they’re for or what they mean.”
“Had you seen the inside of the book before?” asked Gretchen. “Seen these numbers?”
“No. The only time Amber ever showed it to me, she flipped through pretty quickly. All I saw were blank pages and these,” she touched the jagged flaps of paper where pages had been torn out.
Noah said, “Why would her aunt rip pages out of this rather than just destroying the entire thing? Did Amber ever speculate?”