Snip.

“You will not lay eyes on or speak to any boy for a year.”

The scissors made the final cut and the last, thick strands of hair fell loose to the ground and scattered.

“So be it.”

Kathryn leaned close until her lips were next to Eden’s ear. “Your beauty is taken from you, Eden. You have whored yourself out to sin and you will be a vile thing in my sight until you repent. You will not be my angel because you cannot be. You will be my demon, a twisted thorn in my flesh sent to torment me until the day you turn from your sin.”

Kathryn set the scissors on the bed and rose to her feet. “Rise,” she said.

Eden pushed to her feet.

“Turn around so I can see you.”

Eden turned slowly and met Kathryn’s gaze. Tears pooled in Eden’s eyes. Seeing her daughter like this, stripped of her innocence and beauty, Kathryn’s own heart cracked. However hard this was, it was the only way.

“This is what a fall from grace feels like,” Kathryn said. “This is the price of your sin. Ask yourself if it was worth it. Do not be deceived, God cannot be mocked and neither can I. You’re only reaping what you’ve sown, Eden. You brought this on yourself. You did this, no one else.”

Kathryn took a step back. “From this moment forward, you will be cut off from life until you repent. When you’re ready, you let me know. And so you know, the phone is no longer functional. There will be no contact to or from the house by anyone until you’ve come to your repentance.”

Eden wasn’t permitted to use the phone, even when it was working, but Zeke had been very clear: any sign that Eden could not be trusted and the phone had to be cut.

Kathryn walked toward the dresser that sat against the wall and gathered Eden’s collection of straw dolls.

“My dolls?” Eden said.

“Not anymore. It’s time to set aside childish ways. You want to be an adult and so I’m helping you become one. We have to sever all of your old ties to this world so you can be free.”

“What are you going to do with them?”

“The same thing we’re going to do with your hair. Burn them,” Kathryn said. “Now gather up those clippings and place them by the door. I’ll be back to get them in an hour.”

20

I CAN’T rightly describe the darkness that swallowed me in the day and a half following Kathryn’s punishment.

A small voice somewhere in the back of my mind kept telling me to repent. Kathryn had endlessly drilled the idea into me over the years. I needed to change my behavior and be more pure.

Repent, Eden. Repent.

Change your behavior. Breathe and let it go. Just do what’s expected of you and all would be fine. After all, weren’t you reasonably content when you didn’t rock the boat?

Wasn’t life bearable before you decided to step out of the boat?

But the voices of offense screaming through my head made that tiny whisper nothing more than an absurdity. And hadn’t my dreams of Outlaw shown me that I was my own person who didn’t need to suffer my fears?

A shift had occurred in my psyche. I know what had happened—I’d run through it a hundred times as I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling with a fixed jaw. I was finally seeing the light. The dam that had held back a lake of dark waters had finally collapsed and truth was pouring out, like a torrential waterfall. Why walk on the waters of that lake? Better to drain it. Why?

Because I was being abused, that’s why.

Because I was the victim of a monster, that’s why.

Because I was a prisoner in my own room, but Kathryn might as well have put me in a dungeon deep under the house, hidden away from the rest of the world. I was nothing more than her slave, her precious lamb, her sacrificial offering to be used for her gain.

Five years of being abused had secretly filled me with an ocean of bitterness and anger and it was all gushing out, fueled by the realization that I was right.

She’d walked in shortly after I’d stood up to her on Monday and she’d announced her rules as only Mother could, with complete sincerity and conviction, fully embracing her own delusion. Odd, how it was all so plain to me after so many years of living in deception. Someone had turned on the light and I could see everything clearly for the first time. I’d been blind, but now I could see.

Kathryn was insane, if not naturally, then in Zeke’s manipulative grasp. I knew it as she hacked off my hair. As she laid down her list of rules: No eating, no speaking, no washing, ho hair, no leaving my room. No boys, ever. A year, she’d said, and to me that was forever.

True to her word, Kathryn had delivered only water to my room, three times in a large pitcher since issuing my new sentence. I hadn’t seen Wyatt or Bobby, and I hadn’t bothered to face my mother when she’d come in with the water, which she left on the floor by the door next to a pot in which I relieved myself.

I was in prison forever. My room was my eternal hell and I hated it as much as I hated my mother. I hated her for hacking off my hair and making me ugly. I hated her for kidnapping me five years earlier. I hated her for being so weak. I hated her for burning my dolls.

You don’t hate her, Eden.

But I did. And that hatred only seemed to grow with each passing hour. I even gave up praying. Had God ever heard me before? I had said the sinner’s prayer and begged his forgiveness and sworn my allegiance over and over, thousands of times over the years. I had made myself pure and followed his servant’s every rule, and committed myself fully to being pure and where had it put me?

In hell. God, my Father in heaven, was either angry with me or didn’t care, or he was deaf. This after I’d done everything asked of me.

Everything!

If she thought I would cave in and play her insane game, she had another thing coming. Her punishment had backfired.

By Tuesday evening, my grievance toward her was so great, I thought I might die of anger, lying right there on my bed. She wanted to starve me, right? Well I would do one better. I would just die of rage. Her perfect, sacrificial lamb would pay the ultimate price to save them all from their miserable hells.

That’s when I decided I would run away. Yes, I know that I’d decided the same thing five years earlier and then rejected it for Bobby’s sake, but I decided it again, and this time I knew how I would do it.

By the time Kathryn came in with my pitcher of night water Tuesday night, it was all I could think about.

“Good night, sweetheart,” she said.

They were her first words to me in a day and a half, spoken with empathy, as if trying to seduce me into feeling guilty. She wasn’t going to succeed. But I wanted to give her some hope so she would sleep while I escaped.

“Good night,” I said, not bothering to turn to her.

A moment later I heard the door close.

I was an adult now and I was going to be free. And I was going to be free that very night. Nothing else mattered to me anymore. I was going, I was going, I was going, and that was that.

But I had to be smart or I was going nowhere. And I had to take Bobby with me.

The next six hours crawled by like a snail inching across my wall. Only after the house had been completely quiet for two hours did I slowly crawl out of bed and stand up.

Even then I waited for several long minutes, listening for any sound. The house remained silent.

Desperately hoping that I was the only one awake, I crept to the door, still dressed in my bed clothes. I didn’t want to risk any more movement than I needed, and proper dress wasn’t important. Only getting away was. Once I reached the police, I could worry about clothes.

I cracked the door open, listened for another second. If Kathryn woke up and caught me now, I would tell her that I was going to get her to beg her forgiveness—that’s what I’d worked out. Once outside that excuse wouldn’t work.