It didn’t work.
Behind her eyelids, she only saw that woman’s face, plastered there and staring at Everly in accusation. Blond hair blue eyes fair skin. Her . . .
No.
But it was. Everly knew it was.
She needed to close herself off from that vein of thinking; she needed to retreat and leave the building immediately, just like Jamie wanted her to; she needed to forget she had ever seen anything at all.
She needed to go back up.
Everly returned to the elevator and pushed the button for the hundredth floor.
When the doors slid open a minute later, Everly again didn’t let herself think as she headed straight down the long, gray hallway, all the way to the back, to the very last door.
To the woman inside.
Everly opened the door.
Inside, the same woman was sitting in the same position as before and staring just as vacantly as she had been earlier. The woman didn’t flinch, or shift, or react at all as Everly stepped closer, closer.
She tried comparing the woman before her to the vague and fuzzy image she still stored in her memories. Warm summer days with a bright-eyed, fair-haired woman standing behind her. Smiling. Laughing. Wrapping her arms tightly around Everly’s waist and spinning her around.
The woman before Everly now was nothing like that: cold and lifeless and immobile as a corpse.
And yet.
And yet the resemblance was undeniable.
Everly wanted it to be true too much. And Everly wanted more than anything for it to all be in her head.
Because what would that even mean?
For this to be her mother.
Or . . . some version of her mother.
But Everly didn’t even know what she meant by that as she thought it. She just knew that this woman, this strange and still and silent woman, was important, and now that she had opened the floodgates, she needed to know why.
Everly took another step closer, and then—
Thump.
Loud, abrasive, close.
Noise, coming from just down the hall.
Footsteps.
The woman still did not move from her perch on the gray sofa, but Everly thought that perhaps her eyes widened a fraction. If such a thing were possible. That was urging enough for Everly, who knew that she was not meant to be in that building at all, much less up there on that floor, in that woman’s room. So Everly dove behind the couch, hoping that whoever was heading down the hall wouldn’t be all that perceptive and wouldn’t see the edge of the shadow cast by Everly’s bent over form as she huddled behind the gray sofa.
Everly could not see the door, but she heard as it was flung open and someone walked in. The sound of the footsteps crossing closer to where Everly hid made her flinch, and she clamped a hand over her mouth, hoping to cease the erratic breaths that were heaving in and out of her chest. But before the footsteps could fully cross the room they halted, and Everly heard a sharp gasp that she took to be that of the woman.
“So, what would we like to do today?” The man’s voice came out in a sneer, his words cruel, rotten. But also vaguely familiar, and Everly strained to think of where she would have heard that voice before. It was so hard, so cold. She thought that a voice like that should be impossible to forget.
The woman did not seem to respond to the man’s taunt. “No suggestions?” the man growled. “All right then.”
Everly heard something crashing across the room, followed by muted thuds that sounded awfully like heavy boots being kicked into soft flesh. It seemed to go on for ages.
This triggered something in Everly: another memory that didn’t belong to her.
Heavy boots being kicked into her soft flesh.
Heavy fists raining down.
A hand, wide and flat, slamming into her cheek.
Crouched down behind the sofa, Everly clenched her eyes shut, trying just as much to drown out the false memories as the sounds coming from across the room. She felt like a coward, turning away from the woman and whatever it was that was being done to her.
Eventually the awful repetition of the man’s kicks died down. In its place, Everly heard what sounded like a series of manic beeping, shrilly ringing out in the otherwise heavy silence that had fallen over the room. It went on like this for some time before abruptly cutting off. “Always a pleasure,” the man said gruffly. And then Everly heard his heavy stride as he crossed back across the room, opened the door, and closed it sharply behind himself.
And then he was gone, the heavy tread of his footsteps carrying down the hall, fading the farther he moved away from them.
The whole incident could not have taken more than a few minutes, yet Everly felt shaken, both by these new, unsettling images of abuse she never experienced and from having been so close to unmasked brutality. She wasn’t sure what to do. As her senses began to return, Everly crawled out from behind the sofa and went over to the woman’s still form. She touched her shoulder lightly.
“Miss?” Everly asked. “Can you hear me?”
The woman released a small groan, and her eyes fluttered open, looking up at Everly. With a sigh of relief, Everly helped the woman into a sitting position and took in the damage the man had done to her. The woman had a bloody lip that trailed a thin stream of red down her chin. A large gash on her forehead that looked ragged, torn apart. Countless bruises that Everly knew would blossom come morning.
