Twist Me (26 page)

“That’s a handsome fellow,” the artist comments, examining his handiwork. “You don’t see men like that every day.”

My hands clench tightly, my nails digging into my skin. “No, you don’t.”

The next person to visit my room is the sexual abuse counselor they mentioned to me before. She’s a slightly overweight brunette who looks to be in her late forties, but something about her direct gaze reminds me of Beth.

“I’m Diane,” she says, introducing herself to me as she pulls up a chair. “May I call you Nora?”

“That’s fine,” I say wearily. I don’t particularly want to talk to this woman, but the determined look on her face tells me that she has no intention of leaving until I do.

“Nora, can you tell me about your time on the island?” she asks, looking at me.

“What do you want to know?”

“Whatever you feel comfortable telling me.”

I think about it for a moment. The truth of the matter is that I’m not comfortable telling her anything. How can I describe the way Julian made me feel? How can I explain the highs and lows of our unorthodox relationship? I know what she’s going to think—that I’m screwed up in the head for loving him. That my feelings aren’t real, but a byproduct of my captivity.

And she would probably be right—but it doesn’t matter to me anymore. There is right and wrong, and then there’s what Julian and I had together. Nothing and no one will ever be able to fill the void left inside me. No amount of counseling would make the pain of losing him go away.

I give Diane a polite smile. “I’m sorry,” I say quietly. “I’d rather not talk to you right now.”

She nods, not the least bit surprised. “I understand. Often, as victims, we blame ourselves for what happened. We think we did something to cause this thing to happen to us.”

“I don’t think that,” I say, frowning. Okay, maybe the thought did flit briefly through my mind when I was first taken, but getting to know Julian had quickly disabused me of that notion. He was a man who simply took what he wanted—and he had wanted me.

“I see,” she says, looking slightly puzzled. Then her brow clears as she appears to solve the mystery in her mind. “He was a very good-looking man, wasn’t he?” she guesses, staring at me.

I hold her gaze silently, not willing to admit anything. I can’t talk about my feelings right now, not if I want to maintain that icy distance that keeps me sane.

She looks at me for a few seconds, then gets up, handing me her card. “If you’re ever ready to talk, Nora, please call me,” she says softly. “You can’t keep it all bottled up inside. It will eventually consume you—”

“Okay, I will call you,” I interrupt, taking the card and placing it on my bedside table. I’m lying through my teeth, and I’m sure she knows it.

The corners of her mouth tilt up in a faint smile, and then she exits the room, finally leaving me alone with my thoughts.

* * *

For my parents’ arrival, I insist on getting up and putting on normal clothes. I don’t want them to see me lying in a hospital bed. I’m sure they have already spent too much time worrying about me, and the last thing I want is to add to their anxiety.

One of the nurses gives me a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, and I gratefully put them on. They fit me well. The nurse is a petite Thai woman, and we’re roughly the same size. It’s strange to wear these types of clothes again. I had gotten so used to light summer dresses that jeans feel unusually rough and heavy against my skin. I don’t put on any shoes, though, since my feet still have to heal from the burns I got wandering through the remnants of the warehouse.

When my parents finally enter the room, I am sitting in a chair, waiting for them. My mom comes in first. Her face crumples as soon as she sees me, and she rushes across the room, tears streaming down her face. My dad is right behind her, and soon they are both hugging me, chattering a mile a minute, and sobbing with joy.

I smile widely, hug them in return, and do my best to reassure them that I’m all right, that all of my injuries are minor and there’s nothing to worry about. I don’t cry, though. I can’t. Everything feels dull and distant, and even my parents seem more like beloved memories than real people. Nonetheless, I make an effort to act normally; I already caused them far too much stress and anxiety.

After a little while, they calm down enough to sit and talk.

“He contacted you, right?” I ask, remembering Julian’s promise. “He told you I was alive?”

My dad nods, his face drawn tight. “A couple of weeks after you disappeared, we got a deposit into our bank account,” he says quietly. “A deposit in the amount of one million dollars from an untraceable offshore account. Supposedly it was a lottery that we won.”

My mouth falls open. “What?” Julian gave my parents money?

“At the same time, we received an email,” my dad continues, his voice shaking. “The subject was: ‘From your daughter with love’. It had your picture. You were lying on a beach, reading a book. You looked so beautiful, so peaceful . . .” He swallows visibly. “The email said that you were well and that you were with someone who would take care of you—and that we should use the money to pay off our mortgage. It also said that we would be putting you in danger if we went to the police with this information.”

I stare at him in bemusement, trying to imagine what they must’ve thought at that point.
A million dollars
 . . .

“We didn’t know what to do,” my mom says, her hands anxiously twisting together. “We thought this could be a useful lead in the investigation, but at the same time, we didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize you, wherever you were . . .”

“So what did you do?” I ask in fascination. The FBI didn’t say anything about a million dollars, so my parents couldn’t have spoken to them about this. At the same time, I can’t imagine my parents simply taking the money and not pursuing this further.

“We used the money to hire a team of private investigators,” my dad explains. “The best ones we could find. They were able to track the deposit to a shell corporation in the Cayman Islands, but the trail died there.” He pauses, looking at me. “We’ve been using that money to look for you ever since.”

“What happened, honey?” my mom asks, leaning forward in her chair. “Who took you? Where did this money come from? Where have you been this whole time?”

I smile and begin answering their questions. At the same time, I watch them, drinking in their familiar features. My parents are a handsome couple, both of them healthy and in good shape. They had me when they were both in their early twenties, so they are still relatively young. My dad has only traces of grey in his dark hair, though there is more grey now than I remember seeing before.

“So you really were swimming in the ocean and reading books on the beach?” My mom stares at me in disbelief as I describe my typical day on the island.

“Yes.” I give her a huge smile. “In some ways, it was like a really long vacation. And he did take care of me, like he told you he would.”

“But why did he take you?” my dad asks in frustration. “Why did he steal you away?”

I shrug, not wanting to go into detailed explanations about Maria and Julian’s extreme possessiveness. “Because that’s just the type of man he was, I guess,” I say casually. “Because he couldn’t really date me normally, given his profession.”

“Did he hurt you, honey?” my mom asks, her dark eyes filled with sympathy. “Was he cruel to you?”

“No,” I say softly. “He wasn’t cruel to me at all.”

I can’t explain the complexity of my relationship with Julian to my parents, so I don’t even try. Instead, I gloss over many aspects of my captivity, focusing only on the positive. I tell them about my early morning fishing expeditions with Beth and my newfound painting hobby. I describe the beauty of the island and how I got back into running. By the time I pause to catch my breath, they are both staring at me with strange looks on their faces.

“Nora, honey,” my mom asks uncertainly, “are you . . . are you in love with this Julian?”

I laugh, but the sound comes out raw and empty. “Love? No, of course not!” I’m not sure what gave her that idea, since I have been trying to avoid talking about Julian at all. The more I think about him, the more I feel like the wall of ice around me might crack, letting the pain drown me.

“Of course not,” my dad says, watching me closely, and I see that he doesn’t believe me.

Somehow both of my parents can sense the truth—that I’m far more traumatized by my rescue than by my abduction.

Chapter 25

Over the next four months, I attempt to pick up the pieces of my life.

After another day in the Bangkok hospital, I’m deemed healthy enough to travel, and I go home, back to Illinois with my parents. We have two FBI escorts on our trip home—Agents Wilson and Bosovsky—who use the twenty-hour flight to ask me even more questions. Both of them seem frustrated because, according to their databases, Julian Esguerra simply doesn’t exist.

“There are no other aliases you’ve heard him use?” Agent Bosovsky asks me for the third time, after their Interpol query comes back without any results.

“No,” I say patiently. “I only knew him as Julian. The terrorists called him Esguerra.”

Beth’s guess about the identities of the men who stole us from Julian’s clinic turned out to be correct. They were indeed part of a particularly dangerous Jihadist organization called Al-Quadar—that much the FBI had been able to find out.

“This just doesn’t make sense,” Agent Wilson says, his round cheeks quivering with frustration. “Anyone with that kind of clout should have been on our radar. If he was head of an illegal organization that manufactured and distributed cutting-edge weapons, how is it possible that not a single government agency is aware of his existence?”

I don’t know what to tell him, so I just shrug in response. The private investigators my parents hired hadn’t been able to find out anything about him either.

My parents and I had debated telling the FBI about Julian’s money, but ultimately decided against it. Revealing this information so late in the game would only get my parents in trouble and could potentially cause the FBI to think that I had been Julian’s accessory. After all, what kidnapper sends money to his victim’s family?

By the time we get home, I am exhausted. I’m tired of my parents hovering over me all the time, and I’m sick of the FBI coming to me with a million questions that I can’t answer. Most of all, I’m tired of being around so many people. After more than a year with minimal human contact, I feel overwhelmed by the airport crowds.

I find my old room in my parents’ house virtually untouched. “We always hoped you’d be back,” my mom explains, her face glowing with happiness. I smile and give her a hug before gently ushering her out of the room. More than anything, I need to be alone right now—because I don’t know how long I can keep up my ‘normal’ facade.

That night, as I take a shower in my old childhood bathroom, I finally give in to my grief and cry.

* * *

Two weeks after my arrival home, I move out of my parents’ house. They try to talk me out of it, but I convince them that I need this—that I have to be on my own and independent. The truth of the matter is, as much as I love my parents, I can’t be around them twenty-four-seven. I’m no longer that carefree girl they remember, and I find it too draining to pretend to be her.

It’s much easier to be myself in the tiny studio I rent nearby.

My parents try to give me what remains of Julian’s gift to them—half a million with small change—but I refuse. The way I see it, that money had been for my parents’ mortgage and I want it used for that purpose. After numerous arguments, we reach an agreement: they pay off most of their mortgage and refinance the rest, and the remaining money goes into my college fund.

Although I technically don’t need to work for a while, I get a waitressing job anyway. It gets me out of the house, but is not particularly demanding—which is exactly what I need right now. There are nights when I don’t sleep and days when getting out of bed is torture. The emptiness inside me is crushing, the grief almost suffocating, and it takes every bit of my strength to function at a semi-normal level.

When I do sleep, I have nightmares. My mind replays Beth’s death and the warehouse explosion over and over again, until I wake up drenched in cold sweat. After those dreams, I lie awake, aching for Julian, for the warmth and safety of his embrace. I feel lost without him, like a rudderless ship at sea. His absence is a festering wound that refuses to heal.

I miss Beth, too. I miss her no-nonsense attitude, her matter-of-fact approach to life. If she was here, she would be the first one to tell me that shit happens and that I should just deal with it. She would want me to move on.

And I try . . . but the senseless violence of her death eats at me. Julian was right—I didn’t know what real hatred was before. I didn’t know what it was like to want to hurt someone, to crave their death. Now I do. If I could go back in time and kill the terrorist who murdered Beth so brutally, I would do it in a heartbeat. It’s not enough for me that he died in that explosion. I wish I had been the one to end his life.