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That realization hits me like ice water.
“Emma, this could be exactly what he wants!”
She throws the words back over her shoulder without stopping. “Good!”
We round another bend.
The maze seems tighter here, the stalks denser, the path narrower, the sounds of the festival fading until all I can hear is our breathing, our footsteps, and the constant dry scrape of corn leaves against our clothes.
“Emma!” I grab her arm for half a second when I catch up. “Think.”
She rips free. “I have done nothing but think about him.”
The venom in her voice nearly stops me cold.
Then she sees him.
He’s at the far end of the next path, partially lit by a weak string of orange bulbs hung overhead, his face turning just enough for her to know it’s really him.
Danny.
He hesitates.
Big mistake.
Emma’s voice slices through the maze.
“Don’t you dare run from me.”
His eyes flick from her to me, and then he turns and pushes deeper into the corn.
Emma lunges after him instantly.
I swear under my breath and run with her, the maze twisting tighter around us, every turn more claustrophobic than the last.
“Emma,” I say, breathless now, keeping pace at her side, “whatever happens next, you are not doing it alone.”
She doesn’t look at me.
Don’t slow down.
Just keeps following Danny deeper into the dark maze with me right beside her.
This is gonna end badly.
CHAPTER 11
EMMA
He’s here, and he’s running from me. Big fucking mistake.
This isn’t some game of cat and mouse; I don’t want the chase. I want to pin him down, keep him there, and make him hurt the way he made me hurt all those years. All those times he touched me where I told him not to, where I said no, where I made it clear with my words and my body and my tears. The way he twisted everything until I thought maybe it really was all in my head.
The worst part of it all wasn’t just that he was fourteen, or that he didn’t stop until I left school at fifteen. It wasn’t even the years themselves, though they still sit inside me like rot. It was the fact that I believed him. I believed every poisonous word that came out of his mouth.
That I was lying. That no one would ever believe a girl like me. That I was overreacting. That may be normal. Maybe this was just what happened.
I didn’t truly understand what he did to me until I was eighteen. Eighteen years old before I could finally put a name to it and stop choking on the shame of it. Sexual assault. More specifically, child-on-child sexual assault. I went down so many rabbit holes after that, reading article after article, story after story, trying to find something that sounded like me.
