The Witness

fire.”
    “I want a fire. Okay?”
    “Of course.” She sat obediently. “I feel a little strange.”
    “Just sit there, rest a little till I’m done.”
    “They called my mother. She came back. She didn’t want me to testify, or to stay in the safe house the marshals had waiting, or to go into witness protection.”
    “She was worried about you,” Brooks said, as he set the kindling.
    “No. She wanted me to start the summer project, to go back to Harvard, to be the youngest neurosurgeon ever on staff at Chicago’s Silva Memorial Hospital. I was ruining her agenda, and she’d gone to so much time and effort. When I wouldn’t go with her, she walked out, as she had the day it all began. I’ve never spoken to her again.”
    Brooks sat back on his heels. “She doesn’t deserve a word, not one word from you.” He struck a match to the paper he’d crumbled, watched it flame up, catch the kindling. He felt like that, he realized, ready to flash and burn. That was the last thing she needed.
    “I’m going to make that tea. Just rest for a few minutes.”
    “I want to tell you all of it.”
    “You will, but you take a break now.”
    “Are you going to call the marshals? The FBI?”
    “Abigail.” He took her face in his hands. “I’m going to make you tea. Trust me.”
    He wanted to strike something, break something to pieces, to punchhis fist into something hard that would bloody it. She’d been abused as surely as if she’d been found with bruises and broken bones, by a mother who could walk away from a traumatized, terrified child.
    He put the kettle on. She needed to get warm again, feel safe and quiet again. He’d needed to know what she told him, but he wished he’d let it go, let it slide away, from both of them.
    Still, as the kettle heated, he took out his notebook, wrote down all the names she’d given him. Then tucked the notebook away again, made her tea.
    She sat very straight on the couch, very pale and very straight, her eyes shadowed. “Thank you.”
    He sat beside her. “I need to say some things to you before you go on with this.”
    She stared into her tea, braced. “All right.”
    “None of this was your fault.”
    Her lips quivered before she firmed them. “I have some responsibility. I was young, yes, but no one forced me to make the IDs or go to the club.”
    “That’s just bullshit, because neither of those things make you responsible for what happened after. Your mother’s a monster.”
    Her head snapped up, her shadowed eyes went huge. “My—that—she—”
    “Worse. She’s a fucking robot, and she tried to make you one, too. She let you know from the get-go she’d ‘created’ you to her specs. So you’re smart and beautiful and healthy, and you owe her for that. More bullshit.”
    “My genetic makeup—”
    “Shut up. I’m not done. She made you dress as she wanted, made you study what she wanted, and I’ll lay odds made you associate with people she chose, read what she chose, eat what she de-fucking-creed. Am I wrong?”
    Abigail could only shake her head.
    “She may never have raised her hand to you, may have kept you clothed, fed, with a nice roof over your head, but honey, you were abused for the first sixteen years of your life. A lot of kids would have run away or worse. You cut your hair and snuck into a club. You want to blame somebody other than the shooter and his boss for what happened, blame her.”
    “But—”
    “Have you ever had any therapy?”
    “I’m not crazy.”
    “No, you’re not. I’m just asking.”
    “I was in therapy as long as I remember until I left home. She engaged one of the top child therapists in Chicago.”
    “You never had any choice on that, either.”
    “No,” Abigail said with a sigh. “No, choices weren’t on her agenda.”
    He took her face, laid his lips on hers. “You’re a miracle, Abigail. That you could come from something that cold-blooded, that coldhearted, and be who and what you are. You remember that. You can tell me the rest when you’re ready.”
    “Will you kiss me again?”
    “You don’t have to ask me twice.”
    Again, he took her face in his hands, leaned in to lay his lips warmly on hers. She curled her fingers around his wrists to hold him, hold there a moment longer.
    She wasn’t sure he’d want to kiss her once she’d told the whole of it.
    She told him about John, about Terry, the house itself, the routine of it, the legal delays. Stalling a bit, she admitted. She