JAMIE: Shay.
SHAY: She said, “I’m not making excuses. It’s over between us. I’m just saying… I wasn’t crazy. I didn’t make it up in my head. He did love me.”
She looked so fragile. Just skin and bones. And I thought: What if he’d seriously hurt her? Killed her? It happened to one of the women from the shelter. He held that power over us, and I hated him for it, but I hated her more for giving it to him. She was standing there bruised and crying, and all I could think was to shove her away.
JAMIE: Maybe being angry was the only way you could feel in control.
SHAY: I told her none of them had loved her. Not Mr. Trevors or my dad.
（Silence.）
I know. It stunned her, too.
JAMIE: Please tell me your mom stopped seeing him.
SHAY: She did. And junior year, we started AP English, so I didn’t have to see him at school anymore. Only sometimes, in the halls, I’d turn the corner and there he was, ice-cold and haughty as ever. Staring, but not saying a word.
And before you ask: yes, I see the connection between what Mr. Trevors did to my mom and what Don did to me. Part of me wishes I could tell her I know what it’s like now. But the truth is, she didn’t choose to be hit. She stopped once it started. I’m the one who asked for it. I told her she was pathetic, and then I did something so much worse.
So that’s the rift. It’s all me. I’m the one who saw it coming with Mr. Trevors. I felt it with Don, too, after a while. I could’ve saved my mom when I was fifteen, and I could’ve saved Clem and Laurel in college. Instead, I left them to the wolves.
JAMIE: Shay, have you ever heard of repetition compulsion? It’s this theory that people who’ve experienced trauma have a strong desire to reenact it, over and over, to gain mastery over it. It seems counterintuitive, but the thinking is, if they can just get one more shot, this time they’ll get it right. They reach for the same pain over and over, retraumatizing themselves, all the while convinced they’re putting an end to it.
SHAY: You asked why I’m putting myself in danger. It’s because I owe them. Call it whatever you want, whatever theory, I don’t care. This time, I’m going to save someone.
Chapter Twenty-Five
From the outside, 145 Murray Street was a windowless warehouse in far west Manhattan, dark as a dungeon on a darker street. Inside, it was a coked-up, strobe-lit fantasia, ripped from the pages of a Wall Street kingpin memoir. The heavy metal door opened to a doorman, and beyond him, frenetic lights, angry, pounding music, a crush of bodies on the dance floor. But none of that distracted from the centerpiece, playing in larger-than-life dimensions over the back wall. The party buzzed, but I stood cold as ice, transfixed by the sight of the woman shivering on her knees, hands bound, pleading into the camera.
“Snuff film,” said a familiar voice. “Or at least a good fake. The city boys love ’em. They’re so creative. Like little Scorseses.”
I turned to find Nicole beside me, her eyes lined with thick, black shadow, body draped in a slinky black dress. A flagrant violation of the daughter’s dress code.
“Where have you been? You weren’t at the last party.”
Her eyes scanned the room, then she lowered her voice. “I’m with a Pater now. Exclusively. It’s very exciting.”
“Who?”
“I can’t say yet.” Her mouth softened into a smile. “But he’s high up. He’s my ticket to the Hilltop. I can feel it.” She smoothed her slinky dress. “He likes it when I break the rules so he can catch me.”
The strobe lights flashed again, illuminating her. There were small bruises in the unmistakable pattern of fingertips across her chest.
She followed my gaze. “He’s a tad rough,” she admitted. “I was laid up for a few days after our last session. That’s why I didn’t go to the Marquis’s.”