“Let me see you.”
Under the bad fluorescent lighting, the damage came into focus. Red marks along her wrist. Tenderness near her collarbone. Swelling at the back of one hand. Not the body of someone who had moved through the evening in control.
My anger settled into something cold and exact.
“Did he do this tonight?” I asked.
Her mouth trembled. “Some of it.”
Some of it.
That, more than anything, told me how far it had gone.
I sat beside her.
“Natalie,” I said, “look at me. From now on, you tell the truth plainly and only once. You do not minimize. You do not protect him. You do not protect yourself from embarrassment at the expense of accuracy. Do you understand?”
She nodded.
Sergeant Elena Torres arrived with a camera and a legal pad, dark-haired and no-nonsense.
“I’m going to photograph every visible injury,” she said. “Then I’m taking your statement from the beginning. Not from when officers arrived. From the beginning.”
Natalie looked at me as if asking permission to believe this was finally happening.
I nodded.
And because stories like Adrian’s do not begin on the night they collapse, I need to tell you how we got there.
Adrian did not arrive in Natalie’s life with cruelty.