“I don’t know.”
“You let us bury someone under your name. So who was she?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s convenient.”
“It isn’t.”
“Then explain it.”
She looked toward the window.
“I left the motel before the fire.”
“Why?”
“Tyler found me.”
My anger stumbled.
Tyler.
The boyfriend Rebecca had claimed she was no longer staying with.
I’d met him twice.
He’d been charming the first time.
The second time, Rebecca wore long sleeves in July.
I had asked.
She’d laughed it off.
“Did he hurt you?”
Rebecca stared at her hands.
“Yes.”
I waited.
“He’d been hurting me for months.”
Something old and ugly shifted in my chest.
“Why didn’t you tell us?”
“Because you’d warned me about him.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It was to me at twenty-four.”
She swallowed.
“The night I asked you for money, I wasn’t trying to rent a normal room. I was trying to get enough cash to leave Virginia.”
I remembered our argument.
A deposit.
A room.
Nine hundred dollars.
“I said no.”
“Yes.”
“Did you go back to him because I said no?”
“No.”
The answer came immediately.
“Don’t do that to yourself. I found another way.”
She told me she sold her laptop, borrowed money from a coworker, and checked into the motel under her own name because she didn’t understand how dangerous that was.
Tyler found her the next evening.
They fought.
Rebecca ran.
She left almost everything behind.
Wallet.
Bag.
Clothes.
The bracelet Mom had given her for graduation.
She reached a twenty-four-hour truck stop and persuaded a woman driving west to let her ride along.
“What woman?”
“Her name was Simone.”
“And she died in your room?”
“I don’t know.”
Rebecca pressed her fingertips against her forehead.
“Simone was traveling with another woman. We drove for hours. I slept. Somewhere in West Virginia, we stopped. I panicked and got out.”
“Why?”
“Because Simone started asking questions. Where was I going? Who was I running from? Did police know? I thought Tyler might have sent her.”
“Had he?”
“I don’t think so now.”
Rebecca had been exhausted, frightened, and operating on almost no sleep.
She walked away from the truck stop.
A church volunteer found her the following morning and helped her reach a domestic violence shelter.
There, Rebecca did something that changed everything.
She gave a false surname.
Not because she wanted us to believe she was dead.
Because she wanted Tyler unable to find her.
