Chapter 12 - Diane
The unknown number sent one more message, three days later: an address, a time, and a single line. Come alone if you want to know who truly saved you. I went — with plainclothes investigators watching from cars nearby, because I had finally, thoroughly learned not to walk into rooms alone.
At twelve minutes past eight, a woman sat down across from me, and it was Diane.
“It was me,” she said, her voice fragile.
“I saw the live stream.
I’m the one who sent the police to the house.”
I could barely speak.
“How long have you known what they were doing?”
“Since the first night you lost consciousness in our house.” She could not meet my eyes.
She told me, in pieces, how it had gone: how at first Raymond had told her only that I was ill; how she had later found the evidence of what was truly happening; how, when she confronted him, he had threatened to destroy Christopher, strip her of everything, and frame her as a full accomplice if she said one word to anyone.
“And so,” I said, when she faltered, “out of fear for your own comfort, you stood by and let it happen to me again.
And again.” And she looked down at her hands, and she said the only honest word she had.
“Yes.”
That single word hurt worse than any excuse could have.
“I was terrified every day too, Diane,” I said.
“But I couldn’t walk out of that house.
I was the one waking up in the dark not knowing what had been done to me.
You could have left any time.
You could have called anyone.
And you chose your lifestyle over my safety, for months.” She wept, and did not defend herself, and pushed a small external hard drive across the table toward me.
“Everything I could secretly copy,” she whispered.
“Contracts, recordings, transfers, names.
May you like
Raymond has run this for over a decade.” I took it.
And as I did, I understood that her final good act and her long silence were both real, and that neither one cancelled the other, and that I was going to have to learn to hold both.
