Kate had been hinting and even downright begging him for months to be monogamous but he had danced around the conversation for as long as possible brushing it off as if it meant nothing to him. He treated it like it was shackles and entrapment, wanting to keep their relationship to just being friends. Friends who slept together and friends who said they were in love with each other and friends who spent every moment together...but still just friends.
But all that had finally changed that weekend, when Kate put her foot down. She stated that she needed to know that they had a future and if they didn’t then she was going to move on. Derrick had revealed that his reluctance to make things serious between the two of them was due to an ex-girlfriend who had broken his heart by cheating on him with a much older and married man. Kate had been able to reassure him that she would never be so callous as to cheat on him or hurt him in any way and Derrick had decided to trust her. He made the leap and took that plunge into a fully exclusive and real relationship with the woman that he loved.
Neither one of them would have guessed that hours later, an event would occur that would blow their newfound relationship out of the water.
~~~~
When Derrick had dropped Kate off at her apartment after their trip, he had not realized that they were not alone. He had just helped her bring her luggage inside from their weekend trip and he was tired from the drive and the dread of work in the early morning. He hadn’t seen anyone in the hallway or had even the slightest feelings of unease. But they had not been alone, someone had watched them enter the building and had stayed out of Derrick’s sight, only to replace him the moment he left.
Derrick’s replacement was an intruder who forced his way into the apartment the moment Derrick had returned to his car and was driving away, clueless of the scene he had just left behind. The masked invader forced his way into Kate’s apartment through violent means, leaving her barely breathing and desperately trying to crawl away from the mad man. She wasn’t that lucky though, since he quickly overpowered her and dragged her to her bedroom where he raped her and beat her until her bruised and swollen face was almost unrecognizable.
All of this had been told to the police already, they knew every detail as Kate had recounted it to Detective Liz Snow that morning. However, she had left out a pretty key piece of the puzzle and in all honesty, she didn’t really know why. All she had to do was open up her purse, pull out the photograph, and hand it to the detective. But she couldn’t do it and now here she was walking away from the police station, holding her secret tight against her body locked away in her purse and its existence only known to her.
The picture was embarrassing, it was graphic, and it was Kate. It was Kate in the worst moment of her life, bared for the viewer to see every vulnerable inch of her soul. After her attacker had finished assaulting her, he had pulled out a camera from his pocket. It was bulky and big and the kind that printed out instant photographs that took a few moments to fade into a picture.
He had taken two photographs of her laying on her bed, completely beaten up and barely conscious. One photograph he had taken with him and the other photograph had been tossed at her and left for her, maybe as some sort of memento. He had even told her to say thank you, thinking that he was doing her a favor by assaulting her. Each bead of sweat that had dampened his ski mask reeked of narcissism.
Kate thought about Craig, the employee at the coffee shop that she frequented often. She had just pointed out his mug shot to Detective Snow after hours of combing through a giant binder of mug shots. She had been shocked to see a face she recognized and she wasn’t sure if it would even mean anything but the detective had said to tell her if there was anyone in the book that she recognized and she had immediately recognized Craig.
She considered what little she knew of Craig’s personality and it didn’t seem far fetched to think he would be a narcissist. He seemed to be the exact opposite of his cousin, Jimmy, who had gotten him a job at the coffee shop and who had had a crush on Kate for years. Kate had never paid much attention to it because he was much younger than her and had all the characteristics of a teenager, from his greasy hair to his pimply skin.