Aftershocks by Natalie J. Damschroder

parents’ guilt and pain made me repress my own feelings, the therapist made me vent them to her. When I finally felt like it was over enough to look ahead, like I had enough control of my own life, I set it aside. I made sure it wouldn’t hold me back from getting what I wanted.” A wave of shock went over her at the words. She couldn’t believe she had said that to him. “Grant, I—”
    “It’s okay.” But he didn’t look like it was okay. For a man with a classic poker face, he was having trouble hiding what the words had done to him.
    “It’s not okay. Shit, Grant, I didn’t mean…I meant…I didn’t mean you,” she finished with a whisper. It didn’t matter what she said. The truth was, at the time, it had meant him.
    The breeze shifted, and she could swear it carried the scent of dead fish through the sliding screen door and out the window on the other side of the shack.
    “I know what you meant,” Grant finally said. “And now, despite all your hard work and careful planning, here you are. Right back in the thick of it.”
    Zoe hated his bitterness, barely heard beneath the words of understanding. She stood and went to the doorway to look out on the beach.
    “This probably wasn’t a good idea,” she murmured, mainly because she had to. Her fingers found the delicate chain around her neck, the sand dollar charm that was usually tucked under her shirt. Kell had never asked her where it came from, why she never took it off. Now, she wished he had.
    “Depends on your perspective.”
    He’d shoved back whatever he was feeling, because any hint of emotion was gone from his voice. Zoe half turned back to him. “And your perspective is?”
    “The right one.” He picked up the pen from where it lay on the table and tossed it onto the pad. “Come back here and finish drawing.”
    She went back to the table and sat to study the picture. “I don’t know. I think this is as close as I can get.”
    He studied the sketch. “And there were four of them?”
    “Yep. About ten inches tall, I guess? Narrow enough to wrap my hand around. Not very big.”
    He sat back again. “Tell me what you did with them the day you escaped.”
    “You know what I did.”
    “It was almost sixteen years ago. Tell me again.”
    She rubbed her eyes and dredged up that awful day. “Jordie showed up with them at two in the morning. The whooping and hollering woke me up, and the guy who usually sat in my room while I slept must have gone out to see what was going on. I peeked out the curtain over my doorway and watched for a little while. They passed around the totems, toasting them and Jordie. They drank. A lot. Probably did drugs, too, but I stopped watching. Then—” Her throat closed. Grant knew what had happened then. She didn’t have to say it.
    Jordie had come through, after he’d been threatened with his younger brother’s death, after he’d had to watch them cut off Grant’s earlobe. He’d snuck Grant out a few hours after that, when everyone was asleep, to take him home. He’d whispered apologies to Zoe that he couldn’t take her, too. She hadn’t really understood until later. He’d been able to sneak Grant out because they didn’t care about him. He’d been blindfolded the entire time he was at the house, and she’d heard Pat saying they could pick him up again at any time. They didn’t need him. He was just motivation.
    But they did need her.
    Jordie was supposed to get the totems from someone within two days. He did it, and they “celebrated” by torturing him. When the memories surged, her brain attached images to them based on the sounds she remembered, sounds she didn’t really understand at the time. The reality had to be even more horrifying. But she and Grant hadn’t talked about that part, not in detail, and if he didn’t know, she couldn’t tell him. There was no reason to.
    “It took hours, but eventually they fell asleep. I knew things were about to get much worse.” From the