The Starlight Diner awning was a well-worn navy canvas, with faded gold stars dotting the background. As soon as I entered the small restaurant, I saw a rotating cylinder displaying a carrot cake dotted with walnuts and the obligatory carrot made of frosting, pillows of meringue atop a bright yellow gelatin filling, and a variety of chocolate-based confections. A stocky gentleman with his neck draped in a large gold chain and cross and a thick black mustache greeted me.
“I’m meeting somebody,” I told him. I’m just not sure who. I smiled politely and scanned the restaurant. A few of the red leather booths were filled; I saw an older couple bent low to their soup bowls, two young moms tending to their children while struggling to carry on a conversation, a beautiful young woman with soft, strawberry-blond waves, and three teenage boys huddled around one of their phones, laughing. But Gary Kaplan was nowhere to be seen.
I looked back at the young woman, who sat wrapped in a pale-blue oversize pashmina as she stared out the window. Her face was placid, but the fingers on her right hand picked nervously at a cuticle on her left. I focused in on her and noticed that her posture was awful—she was hunched over the table in a way somebody dressed that expensively would have been taught not to be—and she seemed to be fighting tears. I watched as she grabbed for her water glass, which shook so wildly in her hand that she placed it down again without taking a sip.
I nodded to the host and made my way to her, then stood next to her booth for a moment as she looked up at me expectantly. She was radiant, with delicate features and the clearest blue eyes I’d ever seen.
“Are you waiting for a Quality car?” I asked softly. I prayed she would have no idea what I was talking about, but I saw a muted terror behind her eyes before her expression went studiously neutral. Shit. It was her. I didn’t know who she was or what she was doing. But this was who I was looking for. To bring myself to eye level with her, and hopefully reassure her, I took my coat off and slid into the booth opposite her.
She stared at my waist rather than my face as I sat, craning her neck over the table as her face filled with panic, her eyes darting wildly.
“It’s okay,” I said, and held my hands up. I had never in my life elicited such fear in another human. “I’m not here to hurt you, I promise.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything. I’m just waiting for a car.” She looked off into the distance, her legs still on the seat.
“I’m just . . . say anything about what?”
“You’re with Klasko,” she said accusingly.
I quickly realized what had frightened her and ripped my Klasko security badge from the waist of my skirt before tossing it into my purse.
“No,” I said quietly. “No. I’m not . . . Not right now. I’m here . . . I want to help.”
She allowed a sarcastic laugh to escape her lips. “I’m sure you do,” she hissed, rising out of her seat. “Klasko! That name is all over those fucking NDAs I sign.”
I slid across my seat and took a step toward her. When I placed a hand on her shoulder, though, she visibly winced, and I instantly pulled it back. She opened her pashmina quickly to rewrap herself, and I spotted an angry red bruise with purple borders peeking out from the top of her shirt. It was the kind of mark that made me swallow hard and lose my breath—the kind that would be black in a week and green the next and yellow the one after.
She saw me notice it and retreated deeper inside the plush blue cashmere, sitting again. I slid slowly into the seat next to her.
“I’m Alex,” I said, not knowing where else to begin.
“I’m just waiting for my car,” she said, and I gave a small shake of my head to communicate that her car wasn’t coming. Her shoulders slumped.
“What did he do to you?” I whispered.
She smoothed a few red-gold strands away from her perspiring brow and looked me dead in the eyes for a long, pregnant moment. “I can’t,” she finally whispered, taking out the personal NDA for Gary R. Kaplan with which I was all too familiar, the firm’s red letterhead shouting from the top of the page.
“NDAs can’t prevent somebody from reporting a crime,” I assured her. “They’re null.”
She straightened slightly. “I’m not sure it is a crime. I go willingly. I sign up for it.”
“Well, you can tell me. Consider it attorney-client privilege,” I told her. Please don’t point out that Gary is actually my client in this scenario.
She doubled over again in a wave of pain, and I placed my hand over hers. She flipped her palm and squeezed mine tightly until it passed.
“I think I need a doctor,” she said quietly. Her eyes focused and unfocused, and before I even knew what was happening, I was in a cab with her to Lenox Hill Hospital.
I had never taken somebody to the emergency room before, and though I tried my best to fill out the forms, she was so delirious with pain that I didn’t trust most of her answers. According to her Miami driver’s license, she was Kristen Molloy. According to her, she was allergic to all pain meds. “Except morphine,” she added with a laugh. I erred on the side of caution and wrote “might be allergic to pain meds.” I felt like I was watching myself from outer space as I argued with the nurse at the front desk, then moved on to a physician’s assistant, who took one look at her and ushered us into a room with a promise he’d be back with a doctor as soon as possible. I propped Kristen up in front of me and gently removed her blue wrap from her shoulders and began to undo her white button-down so she could put on the robe the PA had provided. As her shirt fell slowly open, her alabaster skin darkened down her torso into angry shades of red and black. I felt tears spilling out over my cheeks despite my attempt to be stoic.
As soon as her top was off, she turned her back to me, and I had to shut my eyes for a moment. Her back was a collage of patchwork violence. I couldn’t imagine which instruments made most of the marks, but there had to have been belts or whips involved. I took in the scratch marks, bloody and raw, and the bite marks up by her shoulder. I held open the robe as she eased her arms through the armholes, and she turned back to me as she pulled the two sides of the robe across her chest.
“I don’t have insurance,” she said.
“Don’t worry. I got it.” I could barely get the words out through my tears.
The PA returned with a tall, balding physician, both of their expressions serious.
“Are you family?” the doctor asked.
I shook my head, and they politely asked me to wait outside, though I could still make out most of what they were saying through the thin curtain forming her ER “room.” She adamantly refused a rape kit. Her breast implant had somehow been flipped. “He kicked it,” she kept repeating. There was a flutter of movement, and from what I could gather from the whispers, she had tried to stand and fallen slightly. I could hear her yelling for them to take their hands off her, when I assumed they were trying to help. Then there was silence. Then crying. I plugged my ears with my fingers and sank to the floor.
As soon as the doctor left, I slipped back in to find Kristen getting dressed.
“You’re finished?” I asked, though I knew she couldn’t have been.
“Thanks so much,” she said, avoiding my eyes as she did.