But she’s alive.
She sometimes thinks back to her life before Seever, or Before Seever, BS, as she likes to think of it, in big capital letters and bolded. She doesn’t remember much of that life, only that she was sometimes hungry and cold, and almost always stoned out of her gourd, and the people surrounding her were a constantly rotating cast of nobodies, people she’d see once and then never again. That was all Before Seever, and she thinks that if she’d never met Seever in that bar, if she hadn’t gone home with him that night, she’d already be dead, from drugs or something, and it would’ve been her own fault, no different from suicide. Seever had meant to kill her, but in those few days she’d spent in his garage, her wrists and ankles tied together, an old rag stuffed into her mouth and sometimes one looped over her eyes, she’d learned an important lesson: She wanted to live. It sounds stupid, it sounds cliché, but those terrible hours spent with Seever made her life that much more precious, and when she finally got out of that garage and ran, her bare feet slapping against the concrete, when she was terrified that she’d look over her shoulder and he’d be there, ready to take a handful of her hair and drag her back into the darkness, those were the most beautiful moments she’d ever experienced. She’s not thankful for Seever and what he did, not really, but maybe she is, just a little.
She’s cleaned up now, no more drugs, no booze. She doesn’t work—her grandfather died the winter before, so she lives off what he left her and student loans, so she goes to school, training to be a vet tech, because she’s always liked animals, they don’t laugh and snicker and stare at the hand that has a stump instead of a pinkie finger, as if it’s the most horrifying thing they’ve ever seen. Animals have never tried to hurt her, not the way Seever did, or the way her uncle used to when she was young. If an animal attacks you, they have a reason, they didn’t do it because they thought it was fun, they didn’t want to see you hurt for no reason at all. Animals don’t laugh when you scream, and they don’t stroke your hair afterward and promise that it’ll all be over soon although it’s a lie. She lives alone, renting a guest cottage behind a bigger house, it’s probably meant to be a garage or a shed but was renovated, the washer and dryer sit in a closet and she can barely get the doors open to throw her clothes in and there’s only a stand-up shower stall in the bathroom, no room for a tub, but she doesn’t care. One day, she thinks, she’ll graduate and get a job, live somewhere better. Maybe she’ll even find some nice guy and go out on dates—or she’ll get a pet. A dog—a dog would bark if someone tried to break in, a dog would be good protection. Or she could get a cat. Probably a cat. She’d wanted to get a cat after she’d moved in, and she asked the owner, an old Korean guy who traveled a lot and liked to play golf, but he’d said no, that he didn’t want a cat pissing on the carpets, her security deposit wouldn’t go that far.
“So you think Seever’s wife knew you were there?” Detective Hoskins had asked, and she’d wanted to have an answer for him, but she wasn’t certain.