BLOOD.

“Ouch!” The knife clattered down on the counter as Molly brought her finger to her mouth, the coppery taste of blood hijacking her thoughts, taking them back to another time and place, a time when the knife was at her throat, held by an evil man, and there was nothing she could do about it.

“Ahh.” She turned on the kitchen faucet and plunged her finger under the water, watching blood from the cut run down the drain.

She’d worked so hard not to go back to that place, the place the traffic accident had sent her. Tearing off a paper towel, she wrapped it around the cut, hoping that would stanch the blood flow. Squeezing the finger, she stared at her wrists and remembered the cuts there.

Suddenly she was back in the trunk. It was dark. Her wrists burned and bled, and she couldn’t get free. When she finally ripped the bonds that held her wrists apart, blood from the cuts on her wrists ran down her hands. And when she scrambled out of the trunk, the blood dripped down her legs and splattered on the dirt as she ran for her life.

She smacked her uninjured hand on her thigh three times, forcing herself back to the present, her kitchen, safety. For a second, the scars were back; her wrists were cut and scabby and painful. Molly pulled her arms to her chest to stop the sobs. They racked her body, burned her throat, and she slid down the front of the dishwasher and sat on the floor, leveled and destroyed by memories that would not release her.