Fractured

'I was sixteen. I knew what I was doing.'

Faith wouldn't let her get away with that. 'Did you really?'

Tears came into the woman's eyes. She looked around for a tissue, and Faith got up to get her a paper towel off the roll.

'Thank you,' she said, blowing her nose.

Faith gave her a few seconds before asking, 'What happened?'

'He seduced me,' she said. 'Or maybe I seduced him. I don't know how it happened.'

'Did you have a crush on him?'

'Oh, yeah.' She laughed. 'Home wasn't exactly nice for me. My father left when I was little. My mother worked two jobs.' She tried to smile. 'I'm just another one of those stupid women with a father fixation, right?'

'You were sixteen,' Faith reminded her. 'You weren't a woman.'

She wiped her nose. 'I was a handful. Smoking, drinking. Skipping school.'

Just like Kayla, Faith thought. 'Where did he take you?'

'His house. We hung out there all the time. He was cool, you know? The cool teacher who let us drink at his place.' She shook her head. 'All we had to do was worship him.'

'Did you?'

'I did everything he wanted me to do.' Mary shot her a searing look. 'Everything.'

Faith could see how easily Mary had probably played into Bernard's hands. He had given her safe harbor, but he was also the person who could bring it all to an end with one phone call to her parents.

'How long did it last?'

'Too long. Not long enough.' She said, 'He had this special room. He kept the door locked. No one was allowed in there.'

'No one?' Faith asked, because obviously, Mary Clark had seen it.

'It was all done up like a little girl's room. I thought it was so pretty. White furniture, pink walls. It was the kind of room I thought all the rich girls had.'

The man certainly was a creature of habit.

'He was sweet at first. We talked about my dad leaving us, how I felt abandoned. He was nice about it. He just listened. But then he wanted to do other things.'

Faith thought of the handcuffs, the vibrator they had found in Bernard's special room. 'Did he force you?'

'I don't know,' Mary admitted. 'He's very good at making you think that you want to do something.'

'What kinds of things?'

'He hurt me. He…' She went very quiet. Faith gave her space, not pressing the woman, knowing that she was fragile. Slowly, Mary pulled down the collar of the baggy T-shirt. Faith saw the raised crescent of a scar just above her left breast. She had been bitten hard enough to draw blood. Evan Bernard had left his mark.

Faith let out a long breath of air. How close had she come as a kid to being just like Mary Clark? It was luck of the draw that the older man in her life had been a teenage boy instead of a sadistic pederast. 'Did he handcuff you?'

Mary put her hand over her mouth, only trusting herself to nod.

'Were you ever afraid for your life?'

Mary did not answer, but Faith could see it in the woman's eyes. She had been terrified, trapped. 'It was all a game for him,' she said. 'We would be together one day, and then the next, he would break it off with me. I lived in constant fear that he would finally leave me, and I would be all alone.'

'What happened?'

'He quit in the middle of the year,' Mary told her. 'I didn't see him again until my first day at Westfield. I just stood there like a gawking teenager, like it was thirteen years ago and he was my teacher. I felt all these things for him, things that I shouldn't feel. I know it's sick, but he was the first man I loved.' She looked up at Faith, almost begging her to understand. 'All the things he did to me, all the humiliation and the pain and the grief…I don't know why I can't break this connection I have with him.' She was crying again. 'How sick is that, that I still have feelings for the man who raped me?'

Faith looked at her hands, not trusting herself to answer. 'Why did Evan leave your school?'

'There was another girl. I don't remember her name. She was hurt really badly-raped, beaten. She said that Evan did it to her.'

'He wasn't arrested?'

'She was a troublemaker. Like me. Another kid stood up for him, gave him an alibi. Bernard could always get kids to lie for him, but he still quit anyway. I think he knew they were on to him.'

'Did you ever see him again? I mean, after he left school, did he try to get in touch with you?'

'Of course not.'

Something in her tone made Faith ask, 'Did you try to get in touch with him?'

The tears came back, humiliation marring her pretty features. 'Of course I did.'

'What happened?'

'He had another girl there,' she said. 'In our room. My room.' Tears rolled down her cheeks. 'I screamed at them, threatened to call the police, said whatever stupid thing I could think of to get him back.' She stared at the markings on the door jamb, the milestones of her children's lives. 'I remember it was pouring down raining, and cold-cold like it never gets here. I think it actually snowed that year.'

'What did you do?'

'I offered myself to him, whatever he wanted, however he wanted.' She nodded her head, as if agreeing with the memory that she had been willing to debase herself in any way for this man. 'I told him I would do anything.'

'What did he say?'

She looked back at Faith. 'He beat me like a dog with his hands and fists. I lay there in the street until the morning.'

'Did you go to the hospital?'

'No. I went home.'

'Did you ever go back?'

'Once, maybe three or four months later. I was with my new boyfriend. I wanted to park in front of Evan's house. I wanted someone else to fuck me there, like I could pay him back.' She chuckled at her naivete. 'Knowing Evan, he would've stood at the window, watching us, jerking himself off.'

'He wasn't there?'

'He had moved. I guess he was on to greener pastures, on to our illustrious Westfield Academy.'

'And you never spoke to him again-not until you saw him your first day at school?'

'No. I wasn't so stupid that I didn't understand.'

'Understand what?'

'Before, he never left bruises where people could see them. That's how I knew it was over. He kicked my face so hard that my cheekbone fractured.' She put her hand to her cheek. 'You can't tell, can you?'

Faith looked at the woman's pretty face, her perfect skin. 'No.'

'It's on the inside,' she said, stroking her cheek the way she probably soothed her children. 'Everything Evan did to me is still on the inside.'

*

WILL WALKED THROUGH the parking lot behind the Copy Right, feeling time start to crush in on him. Evan Bernard would be out of jail this time tomorrow. His accomplice was no closer to being identified. There were no clues to follow up on, no breaks on the horizon. The forensic evidence was a wash. The DNA would take days to process. Amanda was ruthless in her focus. She worked cases to win them, cutting her losses when she felt the odds stacking against her. Unless the four o'clock ransom call revealed something earth-shattering, she would soon start pulling resources, assigning priorities to other cases.

They thought Emma was dead. Will could feel it in the way Faith looked at him, the careful words Amanda chose when she talked about the teenage girl. They had all given up on her-everyone but Will. He could not accept