“Most things are just a matter of time,” he said. “It’s very difficult to believe when you’re in the midst of the pain.”
He nodded. He’d found that to be true. Time didn’t necessarily make the pain disappear entirely, but it sanded the sharp edges. It felt like now it was almost possible to run his fingers along it, to investigate the portions that still held splinters, that still had the potential to make him bleed. He played with the plastic end of his shoelace for a moment. The professor waited. He was good at sensing when someone was taking a moment to choose their words. “There’s one thing that’s still . . . difficult for me. Something that I wrestle with, I guess.”
“What is that?”
He raised his eyes and met the empathetic gaze of the professor. “The girl,” Evan said. “The girl who I was abducted with, who I escaped with . . .”
“Yes,” the professor said. “The girl. What was her name?”
“Noelle.”
“Ah, Noelle, yes. I never met her, but I remember most of what you told me about her. She helped you cope while you were there. She was instrumental in figuring out how to escape.”
“Yes. Yes, she was.”
“Are you still in contact with her?”
Evan shook his head. “It was painful . . . afterward . . .” He sighed. How to explain this?
“You became very attached while in captivity,” the professor said, tilting his head as he studied Evan.
Evan nodded, grateful that the professor was as intuitive as ever. “We did. And afterward, it was like . . .” He moved his hand and lowered his foot to the floor. “It was like we were desperate to be together, but also desperate to be apart.” Was that right? Sort of. “The desperation to be together was stronger.” He frowned. “For me more than her. Maybe. But we both knew we needed to heal separately, I guess.” He gave his head a small shake, frustrated. “I’m trying to verbalize what’s only ever been a feeling. I don’t know. I was wondering if it was a kind of Stockholm syndrome.”
“Stockholm syndrome is a bond with one’s captor. That happens too. But what you experienced is called shared trauma. Or unit cohesion, as it relates to war. And I don’t believe it would be going out on a limb to say you survived a war of sorts, would you?”
Evan thought about that for a moment. The unrelenting fear, the isolation, the constant threat of physical harm, the helplessness. Yes, he supposed they had been to war. An atypical one, but a war all the same. “Yes,” he said. “I would say that.”
“Shared trauma bonds are very, very strong because for a time, they mean survival. Even brothers and sisters living under extreme abusive conditions experience this bond and find it difficult to leave it behind even when the abuser is no longer part of their lives. It complicates relationships in a very profound way. Sometimes that bond is even mistaken for deep love, but it’s a love that feels desperate and possessive.”
Evan sighed, taking his bottom lip between his teeth. “So it’s not really love, then, even though it feels like it?”
“No one can tell you whether you love a person or whether what seems like love is solely a shared trauma bond. What I’m saying is that it would be more likely that the desperation you described was the latter.” He sat forward slightly. “Unit cohesion serves an important purpose when you’re at war, Evan,” he said. “It’s a necessary support system that makes it possible to survive more trauma. The trauma bond outside of war, however, serves no real purpose, as ongoing trauma is no longer a reality, nor should it be. I sense that you felt that. You and Noelle both.”
“We did. We knew it was unhealthy. We just didn’t know how to pack it up. We didn’t know how to stop feeling it.”
“And so you parted ways.”
“Yeah.”
“Perhaps for the best.”
“Perhaps.”
“But . . .”
Evan let out a laugh that was mostly breath. “But I wonder. Because sometimes I . . . miss her.”
“Do you? Are you sure?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, did you get a chance to really know who she was during that time? Did she come to know you?”
He thought about that. “I’m not sure. Do you know someone more or less when you’ve been to hell with them? I have no idea what it’d be like to go to a movie with her. I don’t know if she likes butter on her popcorn or if she prefers comedies to dramas, but I know that she’s the bravest person I ever met and that she’d march straight into a fire rather than let someone else be burned.”
The ghost of a smile floated over Professor Vitucci’s face. “A person is a compilation of so many experiences and qualities,” he said. “But, yes, perhaps you do know things about her that other people never have any occasion to learn about another, and good for them.”
Yes, good for them. That was for sure.
“This has all been on my mind recently because I’ve been looking into some similar situations of people who were abducted and caged. I found a man in Texas who has a similar story.”
The professor’s dark brows raised. “I see.”
“I think there’s a high likelihood that what we experienced might still be going on. Or . . . it was anyway, as of a couple of years ago. I only have his testimony, and the police already looked into it but . . .”
The professor watched him for a moment, a look of concern in his eyes. “You have ways to access information others don’t,” he said. “So I understand why you’d be tempted to pick up the investigation. Just be careful,” he cautioned.
“In what way?”
“That you don’t immerse yourself in something that you need to be distancing yourself from. That you don’t become stuck again.”
Evan nodded. He’d thought the same thing. But how could he not at least try if there was the slightest chance that others out there were—or would be—victimized in the same horrific way? “I keep coming back to one thing,” he said, thinking aloud now. It helped having someone to be a sounding board as he verbalized all the thoughts that had been rattling around in his head, disorganized and half-formed. “And that’s that Noelle and I knew each other. Our fathers had a connection.”
“Ah, yes. Remind me.”
Evan did, summing up the affair his father had had with Noelle’s mother, the stalking, his father accidentally killing her, and the court case.
“Yes,” Professor Vitucci said, “it’s coming back to me now. It is interesting. I believe I thought so at the time too. But the FBI didn’t uncover anything that might have explained that connection.”
“No, they didn’t uncover much,” he murmured. “But it’s the origin story here, and I think it might be important.”
“Ah, yes. Those tell a lot,” the professor said. “If you can access them.”
“It would help if I could ask Noelle some questions, especially now that she could look at things in hindsight, with clearer eyes,” he mused aloud.
“But you’re worried that those same feelings will resurface.”
“Yeah. I guess I am.” He paused. “Also, Noelle disappeared. I emailed her a few times years ago, but they got returned. I have no idea where she lives now.” Or if she’s married. In a serious relationship. Truth be told, that scared him. And it scared him that that scared him. What a mess.
“Well,” Professor Vitucci said, “good thing you’re not a private investigator or anything, because that would make it far too easy.”
Evan laughed, and it felt good. Something shifted inside, feeling suddenly lighter. “True enough.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Evan stepped from his car, looking around with some amount of awe. He felt like he’d arrived in a different world. Off to his left, just over a slatted walking bridge flanked by tall grass swishing in the slight breeze, the ocean cast off diamonds, sparkling in the sun. The call of a bird gliding up above caused Evan to raise his head and squint into the cloudless blue sky before looking back to the wooden sign announcing that he’d arrived at the right place: SWEETGRASS COTTAGES.