In Desperation by Rick Mofina

hesitated.
    Hackett and Gannon exchanged glances.
    â€œIs there some reason you’re reluctant?” Hackett asked. “We want you to volunteer your prints but we can get a warrant for them, if we have to.”
    â€œNo,” she said. “I’ll give them.”
    â€œGood,” Hackett said.
    The technician set things up on her kitchen table, positioning Cora in a chair. But when she placed her fingers on the glass platen, raw, exposed, her mind thundered with a memory and her fingers trembled. “I’m going to need you to relax,” the analyst said.
    â€œSorry, I’m still a bit jittery from everything.”
    â€œI understand.”
    â€œMaybe if I took a hot shower, it might help me relax.”
    The tech nodded and she took her hand away from the scanner.
    Â 
    Cora was coming apart.
    In the shower, she tried in vain to hide from everything, contending with her guilty heart. Needles of hot water stung her, like the sting of mistrust she felt whenever Jack looked at her.
    Steam clouds rose around her and carried her back to the point when her life first began to darken. Cora was sixteen and her friend Shawna had convinced her to go to a party downtown.
    â€œThere’s going to be older college guys there.”
    Cora had never done anything wild like that in her life.
    â€œTime for you to bust out, girl,” Shawna told her.
    At the party, the people were older. Way older. There was talk that some were ex-cons on parole. Cora was uneasy and begged Shawna to leave. But Shawna was having fun and kept passing Cora these fruit drinks the older guys kept making.
    Cora started feeling woozy.
    Someone took her into a bedroom, told her to lie down…don’t worry you’ll be fine…relax…the walls started spinning…the bed was flying and she felt someone undressing her…she couldn’t resist…couldn’t move…the first man stood over her, climbed on top of her…when he finished another man followed him then another as she faded into oblivion…
    Cora didn’t know how she got home that night.
    Did someone look in her wallet for her address and drive her?
    When Cora woke and realized what had happened to her, she climbed into the shower and scrubbed herself raw. She wanted to peel off her skin.
    She wanted to kill herself.
    How could she have been so stupid?
    Shawna never knew. She’d left the party earlier, thinking Cora had left without her. Cora never told anyone what had happened. Not Shawna, not her mother, not anyone.
    She was too ashamed.
    She wanted to apologize to her parents, wanted to make herself invisible. She wanted to die.
    In the time that followed, Cora thought she could handle it, but she couldn’t. She’d turned to drugs. It was the only way she could survive. Her mother and father tried to get through to her, tried to help her.
    â€œWhat’s wrong with you, Cora?” Her mother sensed something had happened. “You’ve changed. Tell me, what’s wrong?”
    Cora was so ashamed she could never bring herself to talk about it and soon grew angry at her mother’s concern, her prodding. It led to one argument after another, until the last one before she left home at seventeen. With Rake.
    A nineteen-year-old heroin addict who’d convinced her that her destiny was to live with him and his friends in a drug-induced splendor by the sea in California. She was so stupid. After Rake vanished, there were other addicts. For years she drifted in a drug-addled haze.
    Then came that night, that horrible rainy night in California.
    She’d struggled to blot it out of her mind, to never think of it, or all the events that came later that had cast her into a pit so dark she thought she would not survive. It was while she was lost in the darkness that she’d become pregnant with Tilly.
    At that time Cora never realized that Tilly was her tiny point of light. She was too terrified. She