A whimper escaped me.
Had he even heard me?
Was he coming?
I needed to focus.
I needed to call the pol—
Even as the thought formed, though, I heard the chorus of male conversation drawing closer. Their voices were loud, so loud that I felt like they had to be drunk or high.
And the last thing I needed was to come across a group of men with dubious intentions in a dark park with no hope of help in sight.
I rushed out of the arch and scurried up the embankment on the other side, then got on top and lowered myself flat against the frigid stone.
My whole body was shaking violently with the cold on my chest and the snow at my back, soaking through my gown.
Tears pricked my eyes as I silently prayed the men kept moving, that they didn’t see me hiding up there.
Slowly but surely, their voices faded off in the distance, but I didn’t dare move until I no longer heard anything but the sound of the wind starting to whip around me.
I needed to call the police.
But I couldn’t tell them where I was; I had no idea.
I needed to get up, to make my way toward something distinctive, so when I called, they could find me. And quickly. Before someone else did.
Stifling a pathetic cry, I pushed up to my knees, then my feet, and started to try to make my way down the embankment.
But the snow was getting thick. And my slippers had next to no traction.
I slid almost immediately, slamming down hard on my ass, then sliding the rest of the way down.
Some part of me just wanted to stay right there, to curl up in a ball, to just give up.
It was then that I swear I heard my mother’s voice in my head, repeating a mantra I remembered all through my childhood, when we were in shelters, when the shelters were full and we were on the streets.
“We are made of strong stuff,” she’d say, over and over and over. “We can make it through this.”
We had been.
I still was.
So I pulled myself up off the ground and started running in the direction of the path again.
My body was shaking hard as I forced myself to keep going, knowing that the movement might be the only thing to keep me alive as the cold set in deeper and deeper until it felt like it was in my very marrow.
I was probably only on the path for a moment when I heard thecrunchof footsteps in the snow.
Moving fast.
Running.
Right at me.
A scream caught in my throat as arms grabbed me.
“Babe,” Venezio said as he whipped me around and yanked me hard against his chest. “It’s okay. You’re okay. I got you.”
