She blinked. “Good?”
“Angry is good,” I said. “Angry means you’re done pretending it was okay.”
Emily’s mouth twitched.
Not quite a smile.
But close.
Officer Mendez called at 9:47.
“We need Emily to come in and give her statement this morning,” she said. “Can you bring her?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Bring the note. Bring any texts, emails, photos. Bring anything he ever gave her that she still has.”
“We will.”
There was a pause.
“Linda?”
“Yeah?”
“She’s going to be okay. I’ve seen a lot of cases like this. Emily’s one of the brave ones.”
I looked at my daughter, sitting at the table in my old T-shirt, looking like she’d survived a war.
“Yeah,” I said. “She is.”
We went to the police station at 11:00.
Emily sat in a small room with Officer Mendez and a detective named Carver, and she told them everything.
She told them about the first time Caleb grabbed her wrist too hard.
She told them about the night he locked her in his apartment and wouldn’t let her leave until she apologized for talking to a male classmate.
She told them about the bruises he said were her fault.
She told them about the night he held a pillow over her face until she stopped struggling.
She told them about Madison.
And when she was done, Detective Carver looked her in the eye and said, “Thank you.”
Emily nodded, her face pale.
“What happens now?” she asked.
“Now we charge him,” Carver said. “Assault. Unlawful restraint. Terroristic threat. Weapons charges. And depending on what the other victims say, maybe more.”
“Will he get out on bail?”
“We’re going to fight like hell to make sure he doesn’t.”
Emily’s shoulders sagged with relief.
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
We left the station just after one.
Emily was quiet in the car.
“You did good,” I said.
“It didn’t feel good.”
“It never does.”
She looked out the window.
“He’s going to hate me now.”
“He already hated you, baby. He just called it love.”
Emily flinched.
But she didn’t argue.
We stopped by her apartment at 2:30 with Officer Mendez and another officer named Liu.
Caleb wasn’t there.
He was still in custody.
But walking into that apartment felt like walking into a tomb.
Everything was beige. Neat. Controlled.
There were no pictures of Emily on the walls.
No sign that she lived there at all.
“He made me take them down,” Emily said quietly. “He said they were narcissistic.”
