She eyes her device but doesn’t move.
“I went out for a hike one Sunday afternoon,” I say. “Alone. Like I always did. Left my husband a note on the kitchen table telling him I’d be back. But an hour into my hike, someone snuck up behind me. Grabbed me. Pinned me. Knocked me out with what I can only assume was chloroform or something similar. When I woke up, I was in a small, dark cabin. Zip ties on my wrists and ankles.”
Delphine massages her lips together, her gaze pinched in my direction.
“For nine years, he held me captive in that little shack in the woods,” I continue. “I’d be left for several days at a time usually. He’d come back to empty my waste bucket and give me just enough food and water to keep me alive so he could torture me—physically, sexually, psychologically.” I wring my hands and inhale a cavernous breath so deep it burns. “I’ve blocked a lot of it out . . . learned early on how to leave my body.”
I rise and lift the left hem of my shirt just above my midriff, showing her a handful of fading scars and various marks, a half dozen souvenirs of The Monster’s abuse. Turning, I pull the right side higher, until she can read the name my captor carved into me with an X-Acto knife, which was surprisingly less painful than the hot lighters he’d pressed against my inner thighs the week before.
Delphine leans forward, squinting as she reads. “L-U-C-A.”
I cover my bare skin and take a seat again, rapping my fingertips against the tabletop in quick succession, momentarily trapped in a memory.
“He carved his name into me,” I say. “Branded me. Like a piece of property. He said I needed something to remember him by when he wasn’t there reminding me . . .”
She lifts a palm. “Wait a minute. Luca. Is that the same Luca you visited the other day? The friend who offered you a job?”
I study her face, a feeble attempt to gauge her reaction. I wouldn’t blame her if she didn’t believe me. There are times I, too, wonder if it was all a dream—a nightmare.
“Yes,” I say. “Turns out the man I married . . . was nothing more than a monster.”
“Wait—Luca was your husband?” Her eyes glow wild with natural disbelief that I don’t take personally.
“He was.” I peer into my lap, folding my hands before picking at a hangnail until it bleeds. “I loved him. Or at least I thought I did.” An endless bout of silence circles between us. “I’ve tried to make sense of it a million times. The only thing I can think of is that he was playing out some sick sexual fantasy of his. That the man I met and fell in love with was nothing more than an act. He lured me to Bent Creek with false promises of a beautiful life together, and then he waited for the right opportunity to do what he’d always planned to do. He let it slip one day that the cabin belonged to his grandfather, that he inherited it after his death years before. Everything he did had been planned. He was just waiting for the right girl to come along so he could execute it.”
She nods, quiet for another beat as she digests this. “How did he know where you were that day?”
With a hand pressed against my lips, I exhale. “There was a GPS tracking device on my backpack. A lot of hikers have them. It’s a safety thing. He would’ve known exactly where I was.”
“Sick bastard.”
“Among other things . . .”
Rising from the table, I fetch a glass of water to tamp down the nausea in my middle.
“For the first few weeks, he’d show up with that day’s paper,” I say. “I’ll never forget that first headline . . . MISSING BENT CREEK NEWLYWED . . . and below that was a blown-up picture from our Vegas wedding. He then proceeded to read the article out loud, grinning wider than a Cheshire cat during the parts that painted him as a grief-stricken husband worried sick about his missing bride. The entire thing was bullshit. Every word of it.” I return to the table. “I mean, it was but it wasn’t. The lies he fed them were the same ones he fed to me. Telling them all about the life we had planned. How I was going to nursing school in the fall. And we were going to open a restaurant someday. That we had big plans for our future. And how we were wild about each other. Even called us soul mates.”
There are days when the entire thing is shrouded in a dreamlike haze, days when I find myself wondering if any part of those first few months was real. They say first loves are intense, that they can hook their horns in parts of your heart you never knew existed and make you blind to reality. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t fantasize about our exquisite early years, missing them with confusing intensity.
The Luca I knew from our diner days was quiet and docile. Always kept to himself. Stealing looks and gifting the occasional smile in passing until he finally worked up the nerve to approach me during a break one slow Thursday afternoon. With little finesse and a load of awkwardness, he asked if I wanted to catch a movie with him that weekend.
At first I told him no. Politely, of course. But the crestfallen look on his face haunted me for days, snapping my heart in two every time I thought about it.
I convinced myself I did the right thing.
He wasn’t my type—not that I dated much. I was freshly twenty and had better things to do than find some local boy to chain myself to. But I tended to go for the louder guys, the ones who weren’t afraid to make their presence known, who weren’t satisfied with blending into the wallpaper. The ones who cracked witty one-liners, worked on cars, and repeated movie lines with impressive accuracy.
There was a darkness about Luca, an intensity I couldn’t ignore. Some days I felt sorry for the guy, knowing full well what it’s like to be an outsider myself. Other times I couldn’t shake the frigid blast that blanketed the room in his presence. Even his stare would make me lose my train of thought sometimes.
I shamed myself for being dramatic, for viewing him the same way everyone else did.
I convinced myself he was simply misunderstood.
A misfit like me.
As time went on, any time the kitchen staff poked fun at him behind his back, I didn’t hesitate to defend him. Everything about him screamed bully material, and I’ve always had a soft spot for the underdog.
It wasn’t until a month later—on a rainy night when I hitched a ride home with him and we ended up driving around town for two hours—that we really got to talk. It was almost like being with an old friend.
Turned out all he needed was to be on his own turf. Seated comfortably behind the wheel of his car, he waxed on about fascinating conspiracy theories, classic literary fiction, cryptocurrency, AI, and the dark web. All this time I had thought he was void of personality, but all it took was a little change of scenery and the real Luca had a chance to shine.
I like your brain, I told him when he dropped me off later that night. It’s different.
We sat in his idling car and he laughed, telling me it was a weird thing to say to someone but he’d accept the compliment anyway. I let him take me to that movie the following weekend. We were inseparable after that.
“He had me legally declared dead,” I say, breaking our silence. “A couple years after I went missing.”
Delphine chuffs. “Why would he do that?”
“Impossible to know.” I lift a shoulder. “I only have theories.”