Chapter 6 - The Reunion in the Cell
For several long minutes, the bottom of that dark, subterranean hell was filled with nothing except the sound of our crying—five years of grief, five years of lies, five years of impossible survival distilled into a single, agonizing embrace.
Janet buried her face in the crook of my neck, her trembling fingers gripping the back of my blouse as if she were afraid that if she let go for even a second, I would vanish like a phantom born of starvation and fever.
“They said... they said you stopped coming to the cemetery,” Janet whispered, her voice rough, hoarse, and cracked from disuse. “Linda... Linda told me you gave up on me. She said you moved away to Florida with Uncle Sam to start over. She said nobody was ever coming back for me.”
“That lying, evil bitch,” Sam muttered from the top of the stairs, his fists clenched so hard his knuckles were purple.
“Shh, sweetheart, don’t talk, save your strength,” I murmured, kissing her forehead over and over again, tasting the salt of her tears mixed with my own. “We’re taking you out of here right now. The paramedics are waiting up top. You’re going to a hospital, you’re going to get real food, and you’re never, ever going to see these monsters again.”
Janet flinched violently at the word monsters, her frail body curling inward.
“Ryan... Ryan comes down here sometimes,” she whispered, her voice dropping into a terrified tremor. “When Linda isn't looking. He brings soup. But he tells me I brought it on myself. He says if I had just stayed quiet, if I had just pretended to die in that car crash like they planned, nobody would have had to get hurt.”
The sheer, sociopathic cruelty of it made my blood run cold. They hadn't just imprisoned her; they had tortured her psychologically day after day, convincing her that her own family had abandoned her, that the world outside had forgotten her name, that she was legally dead and buried beneath six feet of dirt.
“He’s arrested, honey,” I whispered fiercely into her ear, holding her tighter. “Ryan is in handcuffs in the sheriff’s car right now. And Linda... Linda is about to find out what happens when a mother realizes someone tried to murder her child.”
Sheriff Turner knelt beside us, his professional demeanor giving way to a raw, visible anger. He gently placed a warm, heavy jacket over Janet’s shivering shoulders.
“Can you stand, Janet?” Turner asked gently, flashing his light toward the stairs. “Let’s get you up into the fresh air. EMS is staged outside with a stretcher.”
Janet nodded slowly, her legs shaking uncontrollably as Sam and Turner hoisted her gently under her arms, carrying her step-by-step up out of the darkness and back into the golden light of the Texas afternoon.
May you like
As we crossed the threshold out of the basement and into the hallway, the warm breeze rolling in through the open front door hit Janet’s face for the first time in sixty months. She stopped dead in her tracks, throwing her head back, closing her eyes, and breathing in the scent of green grass and open sky with a look of pure, transcendent relief.
“It’s real,” she whispered, tears streaming down her pale cheeks. “The sun... the sky... it’s still here.”
