five
She was forty-one years old and she had been other ages. This is what she told herself. That the girl who had gone to the island was someone else. A stranger who lived in a country she had left long ago and would not return to.
Some days this was almost true.
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She heard the news in her kitchen. The radio on the counter. The coffee going cold in her hands. The voice of the announcer saying words that did not at first arrange themselves into meaning.
Dead. Found in his cell. Apparent suicide.
She set the coffee down. She watched her hands do this. Steady hands. She had learned to make them steady.
She waited to feel something.
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There were years she did not remember. This was not a failure of memory but a success of it. The mind knows what it cannot hold. It builds walls. Black bars. It files certain things in rooms without doors and loses the key on purpose.
She had been fourteen. She had been fifteen and sixteen and seventeen. She had been told she was special. She had been given things—money, attention, the feeling of being seen by men who owned the world. She had not understood what she was paying until the bill came due.
The bill always came due.
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The body keeps its own records.
She could not wear certain fabrics against her skin. She could not be in small rooms with the door closed. She could not hear a particular song from a particular year without leaving wherever she was and walking until her legs ached and the song faded into the noise of traffic and wind.
Her husband knew some of it. Not all. There were black bars she would not lift for anyone. He had learned to not ask about the nights she woke with her heart pounding and her hands searching the dark for something that was not there. He held her and did not ask and this was the greatest kindness anyone had ever done her.
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The lawyers had come years ago. His lawyers. Men in suits who smiled and did not smile. They had documents. They had questions. They had a way of asking that made her feel she was the one who had done something wrong.
She had told her story. She had told it again. She had told it to police who did not write it down and prosecutors who did not return her calls and journalists who wrote stories that were never published.
Then there was the other document. The one they asked her to sign. The one that would make the questions stop. The one that came with a number.
She signed it.
She was twenty-three and tired and broken in ways she could not name and she signed it. She took the money that felt like being purchased all over again and she built a life on top of it and she never spoke of it and this was what they had paid for. Her silence. Her black bars.
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Other women came forward over the years. She watched them from a distance. She watched them be disbelieved and dismantled. She watched lawyers take apart their stories word by word. She watched the internet call them liars and opportunists and worse.
She did not come forward.
She told herself it was the NDA. The document with her name on it. The money she would have to return. But she knew it was something else too. She could not bear to become a story. To have her face on screens. To have strangers debate whether she was telling the truth about the worst thing that had ever happened to her.
The silence was a prison. But it was her prison. She had decorated it. She had made it almost comfortable.