The Never List

her trust fund allowance. She would be financially independent for the first time in her life. It was a huge step for her, and she solemnly cashed the first check, proud she’d gotten this far on her own. She almost couldn’t believe it.
    It didn’t take that long, however, before Jack decided Christine’s time had come.
    Christine had always been too traumatized to tell us the details of how she went from being Jack’s research assistant to being his captive, but there she was before first semester finals, down in that cellar. We had always wondered whether she was the first—whether he had spent months waiting for exactly the right target, and then Christine had come along—or whether it was simply time for him to capture a fresh set of victims.
    Either way, she ended up in that cellar, chained to the wall, spending the first hundred and thirty-seven days down there alone in the dark, surely wishing she’d gone to Yale after all.
    For that was part of Jack’s vision all along—to watch as she tormented herself with her own profound sense of failure. She hadn’t been able to live on her own in the end. She hadn’t been able to make it outside the protective bubble of the überrich. Once she’d left the rarefied world of the Upper East Side, she had been exposed as weak and defenseless. And she would pay an awfully high price for leaving it.
    So she spent the next five years down there, thinking and remembering and regretting.
    It must have been too much for her, because Tracy and I watched her fall apart in that cellar. Bit by bit, the darkness started to overtake her, and there was nothing we could have done, even if we’d wanted to. She had a complete breakdown over those last three years, and it accelerated rapidly toward the end. Her mind deteriorated before our very eyes.
    She had long since stopped making sense when—and this was even more dangerous for her—she stopped taking care of herself. It didn’t take long for her to look dirty and disheveled. For her face to be smudged with muck from the cellar floor, for scattered clumps of matted hair to burst out all over her head. For her to smell. And Jack didn’t like that.
    Some days, though, she scared us as much as he did, as she sat hunched over, mumbling unintelligibly there in the dark. She would huddle up on her mattress, clutching her knees, and rock back and forth, her eyes closed, her voice soft as she whispered to herself for hours.
    I didn’t try to make out what she was saying. I didn’t want to know.
    Honestly, it was a relief that she slept so much, because when she was awake, you couldn’t help but keep one eye on her at all times. It was exhausting. You never knew when a violent outburst of tears was coming. Or worse. I sometimes thought that even Tracy, her erstwhile protector, seemed a little afraid of what she might do. At any rate, toward the end, we both stayed as far away from her as we could manage in such close quarters.
    If you had asked me back then, I would have said that, of the three of us, Christine would be the one who would never recover. That she was the one whose psyche was battered beyond repair. I would have predicted she would be totally devastated from this experience forever, unable to have any semblance of a normal life if we made it out alive.
    It just goes to show, you never can tell. I had never been more wrong about anything in my life.

CHAPTER 12
    Tracy and I arrived in front of Episcopal, an imposing town house that had been impeccably maintained. A sea of adorable, perfectly turned out children headed out the door, escorted by nannies and emaciated trophy wives. A line of black Town Cars waited outside.
    We stood close by, watching, but not so close that we would make the staff uncomfortable. Tracy nevertheless got a few looks, so we crossed the street, pretending to be deep in conversation.
    “Do you see her?” I asked, my back turned from the scene of Upper East Side perfection.
    “No. She probably has one of her teams of nannies pick up her children,” Tracy remarked with irritation.
    “She has a team of nannies?”
    “I guess that’s not fair. I’m speculating. Oh wait, I think that’s her coming from a couple of blocks away. Hard to tell becausethese women all look the same. Hurry, let’s intercept her before she gets too close to the school.”
    We ran down the block, and by the time we got to Christine, we were both winded. We must have looked ridiculous, all red faced and