Member-only story
The Vanishing:
Baby Steps
Chapter Thirty:
As soon as we got home, Rachel shut herself off from us. She shut herself off, which was understandable. In the past six years, she had been held prisoner by a madman.
The only thing on my mind was to reach out to Rachel, to tell her that everything would be okay. Truthfully, I didn’t know whether she’d be okay again. She had been hurt in ways I could not comprehend. As Bobe understood more about pain than most of us, she also tried reaching out to Rachel, but her attempts were met with dead eyes and silence.
I hated what my sister had suffered at the hands of the monster. It was not fair to call the person who had hurt Rachel a man. No one who hurts another the way deserves that title.
I had been hurt too, hurt by the man, because I had gotten to close. Even if he had not pulled the trigger I had no doubt he was the reason I was in this chair, paralyzed. But Rachel’s pain ran so much deeper than what I was going through my scars were physical, but Rachel’s went soul deep and I wanted to reach out to her, making sure she was okay. But Rachel was shutting me out, shutting everyone out. She needed time, I understood that. Healing wasn’t one giant step forward it was a thousand tiny steps.
