"I told you not to ask me about my past," she said to Craig. She held up the credit card receipt and stared at him, frowning, a hand on her hip. "Why did you have to go to Bellingham?"
He came over to her and took the receipt out of her hand, looking at it with a guilty expression on his face. "I want to know your past," he said softly. "Besides, you shouldn't be snooping in my things if you feel such a need for privacy." He tucked the receipt into his pocket and exhaled in frustration.
"You shouldn't be snooping in my life," she replied. "I'm trying to forget it."
He took hold of her shoulders, his eyes on hers. "Tell me why."
She shook her head.
"Why won't you tell me?" he asked, frustration in his voice. "If we're going to be together, I need to know."
"Why do you need to know?" she protested. "It's bad. That's all you need to know. Of all people, you should understand. You don't do this," she said and pointed to the faint scars where she'd cut herself when she was younger, "if you were happy and had a good childhood. I had a bad childhood, okay? My family is bad. I ran away from home because of it. I don't want to talk about my family, I don't want to see them, I don't want to ever hear about them or where they are, or what they're doing."
"I should know what happened," he said softly. "In case I need to know for some reason. I can keep a secret, Rachel. I can protect you."
She gave him a look of disbelief. "You couldn't protect me. Not from him."
She should have shut up at that point, but she couldn't.
"Why not?"
She shook her head, intending to stop talking, but unable. "Because he's strong. He's big. He's mean, and he has every kind of weapon you could imagine."
"We could go to the police," Craig said and led her over to the sofa. He took her hand and pulled her down beside him. She sat on his lap, trying to avoid his eyes. "We could tell them what happened, and they could arrest him, if it was as bad as you say. He hurt you. He made those thicker scars on your breasts and stomach. He made those, right?"
She shook her head quickly, not wanting to tell him anything. "I'm not talking about it."
"It's okay," he said and exhaled slowly. "You don't have to tell me anything you don't want to tell me. One day, if you want, you can tell me everything. I won't judge."
He wrapped his arms around her, and she felt his warmth and tenderness. He had never once hurt her. He had never once forced her to do anything. It made her heart almost burst with love for him that he was so good, so patient. He wanted to protect her, but she knew he couldn't ever hope to.
Her father was just too evil.
No one could protect Sadie or her mother from him. She knew that even Craig or the police couldn't protect her from him either.
She wanted to tell Craig the truth about it all, get it off her chest, unburden herself of the pain of her past, but she knew it would only lead to badness. The fact that he went to Bellingham to find out about her was dangerous. All she could do was hold it in and beg him not to look any deeper.
"Don't go back to Bellingham again," she whispered against his shoulder. She glanced up in his eyes. "If you do, you'll put me in danger. He can't ever know where I am. Ever. That's why I ran away."
He nodded and she hoped he finally understood.
"Well, the first thing we're going to do is get you feeling safer," Craig said. "There's a self-defense and personal protection class at the community center run by a retired cop. It teaches you how to protect yourself from being attacked or abducted. You should take it. We could take it together, if you want. That way, if the past ever catches up with you, you can stop it from harming you."
Rachel exhaled. She was glad he was turning his focus on protection instead of knowing more about her.
"Okay," she said softly. "I'd like to learn how to protect myself. I'd like to teach Sadie as well."
"When she's old enough, she can take the class. I think it's for age twelve and up."
Rachel nodded and put her hand on his arm. "No more snooping, okay? No more questions."
He nodded. "No more snooping or questions until you're ready."
"I won't be ready until he's dead," she said in a quiet voice.
"Oh, Rachel," he said, and his voice cracked. He pulled her into his arms once more and she let him hold her, needing his warmth to chase away her sadness. She sighed and tried to put the receipt out of her mind, but she feared he'd opened a hornet's nest.
For the next few weeks, she went to the class down at the local community center. Once a week at the fitness club, she learned how to walk with confidence to discourage anyone who might be following her. She learned how to spot danger and how to avoid being abducted. She learned how to escape from different approaches and holds. She learned where to hit and practiced hitting a punching bag, kicking the bag in the nuts, ramming her fingers into imaginary eyes, elbowing necks. She learned how to escape zip ties and various restraints.
She even practiced shouting, which was hard for her. She was short and had a slight build. She had barely any voice, having always been so passive, but Danny, the police officer who taught the course, said that attackers relied on women being quiet and fearful.
"You have to scream," he said firmly. "You have to yell. You should be angry that someone wants to harm you. The man who is trying to grab you is counting on you being nice. He's hoping you'll be too polite to scream or yell but that will only get you dead. You have to get mad. Never ever get in a car with anyone. Never ever let them put you in the car, in the trunk. Once they have you, they'll take you somewhere they can control you and no one will find you. You can't let that happen. You have to scream, you have to run, you have to kick and yell when you're still in public and there are people around. Once you're out in the countryside, you're dead. Save yourself before that happens. Once it does, the odds are against you."
She promised herself that she'd never let any man take her, get her into a trunk and drive her into the forest. So, even though she was tiny and thin and had a soft voice, she tried to get mad. She'd bitten back her anger for so many years, she could barely remember how it felt. Instead, she'd taken drugs or drank away her anger. She'd swallowed it and turned it into small cuts on her thighs and arms alongside the ones he made.
The stab wounds that finally drove her to run away.
She wasn't going to let silence or fear make her an easy target.
She practiced yelling when she did kickboxing. She screamed into pillows when she was alone, when Craig was at work and Sadie was at school. She stood in front of her mirror and held her knife in her hand, practicing stabbing whoever tried to abduct her, always imagining his face when she drove the blade down.
It felt surprisingly good.
In the end, the course and the kickboxing were great antidotes to her fear. After the six weeks were up, and she got her certificate in self-defense and personal protection, she felt a lot better about things. She didn't want to get a gun, like Craig suggested. Guns frightened her and she worried about Sadie finding it and accidentally shooting herself or someone else.
Instead, she got a Kershaw Natrix XL pocketknife and ankle holder.
From that day on, she wore that concealed knife whenever she went out. She'd drive to the campus at night for her class, park in the parking lot, and feel completely safe. If anyone dared to try anything with her, she'd simply bend down and pull it out. One of the things the police officer who taught the self-defense course made them practice was aggression.
She had to learn to yell and scream and punch and hit.
All the things he'd beaten and threatened out of her.
So, she took up kick boxing. Three days a week, she went to the fitness club with Craig and learned how to kick box. Craig smiled, watching her with her gloves on and helmet, the mouth protection, while she kicked and punched and grunted. He seemed really proud of her. She even put on a bit of muscle during those months after she'd found the receipt.
"Look," she said and held up her arm, tensing her bicep to show how much bigger it was. "I'm getting stronger."
"You are," he said and pinched her arm to feel the muscle. "Pretty soon you'll be able to take me."
She laughed because Craig was so tall and thin, and so harmless. She couldn't imagine him hurting a fly.
In fact, she laughed once when he opened the window in the apartment just so he could let a fly outside instead of killing it with a folded newspaper, the way she was going to.
"Don't kill it," he said and shooed it outside. "It has a life. It has a place in the ecosystem."
"As long as it doesn't have a place in my apartment," Rachel said and smiled at him, watching as he tried desperately to shoo the fly outside. The stupid thing kept coming back in and Craig would have to chase it back out again. Finally, after many attempts, Craig managed to get the fly to leave.
He seemed really happy not to have to kill that fly.
He really was harmless. Maybe it was him who should take the self-defense class...
Still, she worried that Craig going up north would alert her father that she was still alive, and someone was looking for him. To be safe, she started to hoard her money, saving it in case she had to leave again. She went to Mickey one day and asked him if he could get her and Sadie fake ID that could be used to cross into Mexico if she needed.
"I know people who can get you what you need, but do you really want to go down that route?"
"I might have no other choice," she said. "Can you help me out? I'll pay whatever it costs."
He finally nodded and sighed audibly. "Okay, but I don't like it. You deserve to be happy, and so does that little girl of yours. After all you've been through. What names do you want, if you have any preferences?"
Rachel shrugged. "For me, just something that starts with R, so it's easier for me to remember. For Sadie? How about Elsa? That's her favorite character from the movie Frozen. She'll like that. Can you do that?"
"I can try. If Craig is being bad to you, I'll talk to him, straighten him out.”
"No, I'm happy," she said and smiled. "Craig is great and I love what I'm doing. This is just an insurance policy in case my past catches up with me."
Mickey came through with the fake ID for her and Sadie and Rachel tucked the documents into a lock box she bought at Walmart. Soon, she had a tidy sum put away in the event that the shit hit the fan, as her father used to say. In her case, that meant her father finding out where she was.
So, she really felt safe for a while.
She grew more confident in general because of the self-defense class and the knife tucked into its holder on her ankle. She walked down streets at night and was no longer afraid. She didn't need drugs or alcohol to numb the pain. Instead she practiced kicking and yelling and stabbing. She had learned to use her own innate desire to protect herself.
Life went on as normal, with Sadie at school and Rachel taking classes and working lunch shifts at Mickey's, taking the occasional evening shift when Mickey needed someone to stand in. Craig worked taking photos for the Sentinel, and he worked on his personal projects, photos of downtown, the waterfront, and occasionally, of mountains. He started doing film projects as well, and used drone shots, stringing together views of the city with free music he found on the internet. They even went into the mountains to take shots of the Cascades.
He was really an artist at heart, which was strange, since he was so interested in the science of things.
Their relationship was good. She felt safe with him. She trusted him with Sadie, never worried that he would abuse her even when the two of them were alone.
They were a happy little family of choice -- not one of birth and blood.
And then...
One day a month later, she felt like someone was following her. It was nothing at first, just a person ducking into a doorway when she turned around to check behind her.
No, it couldn't be...
She was just creeped out after Craig told her about a case in the interior of Washington State of a child porn ring that had been operating for years under everyone's noses. It had state-wide tentacles and was linked to the sex trade. When he told her about the case, she tried to act nonchalant, as if she wasn't interested. Of course, she thought about her father and his friends right away, because they used to take pictures of what they did to her. When Craig told her there had been murders of children up in Bellingham and in Idaho and Montana, and that a child serial killer was operating in Washington State, she had trouble sleeping at night for the first time in a long time.
It made her think about Sadie and what happened way back when.
She began to feel the hairs stand up on the back of her neck when she walked alone to her car late at night after her class was over or after a shift at Mickey's. She thought about her knife, tucked in its holder down beside her ankle. She thought about what she'd do if someone tried to grab her from behind -- how she'd twist around and jab the man's eyes out. How she'd knee him in the balls. How she'd elbow him in the throat. How if she had to, she'd reach down and grab her knife and stab him.
She always thought her father would come after her, try to kill her for leaving. She never thought her father would take little Sadie in the middle of the day.
But that's what he did.