Page 160 of We Are All Guilty Here

Emmy’s quick laugh was more from shock. “Jesus, I hate when you’re right about shit. I went outside and barfed up the lining of my stomach.”

Jude borrowed a page from Emmy and took a deep, calming breath. “The stillness you’re talking about is a trauma response. There are only three responses you can have: fight, flight, or freeze. You know what flight is. You run away. Freezing is often described as disassociation. You mentally go somewhere else so you don’t have to process what’s happening to your body. With Virgil, your brain chose fight. Dopamine flooded the reward center to reinforce your behavior because it was good for your survival.”

Again, Emmy was paying close attention.

“Feeling invincible can be a rush. The problem comes when you seek out those behaviors for the dopamine reward. You start pushing boundaries, putting yourself at risk, making bad decisions for the thrill of it, hurting yourself in the process.”

“That sounds like addiction.”

“That’s exactly like addiction. Both work on the same reward pathways. They can both alter the structure of the brain and change how it processes information.” Jude shrugged. “Why do you think I was so good at my job? It’s something that serial killers experience, too.”

Surprise flashed in Emmy’s eyes. “Tell me.”

“Some people think serial killers make mistakes because they want to get caught, but the real reason is they’re as desperate as any other addict. The first time they kill, they experience a rush of euphoria. The next time, it’s good, but it’s not like that first time. Their brains have built up a tolerance. They chase the euphoria by pushing boundaries, becoming more sadistic, more craven, to trigger the reaction. The desperation makes them sloppy. All they care about is feeling that rush.”

“The same as alcoholics.”

“The same as me. I took stupid risks and put myself in bad situations. I lost things that mattered. Things that were cherished. Things that I still cherish.”

Emmy picked at the Velcro straps again. “What you asked about Jonah. He didn’t hit me. He pushed me down the stairs when I was pregnant, and I felt so vulnerable. Trapped, if you want to know the truth, because we had Cole between us. After that, I just let him do whatever he wanted. That’s the shameful part of it. He didn’t have to hit me because I always gave in.”

The pain in Jude’s heart felt like glass shattering into millions of pieces. She should’ve been there. She could’ve protected her. “Emmy Lou, I’m sorry I missed so much of your life.”

Emmy’s eyebrows furrowed. “Less than two weeks ago, you didn’t even know I existed.”

Jude felt the danger of flying too close to the sun. She pulled herself back. “You should usefewer thanwhen you’re talking about numbers.”

Emmy didn’t laugh this time. She took a deep breath and held it in her lungs for a very long time. “The night that Cheyenne and Madison went missing, Dad told me something, and I didn’t realize until later that he was talking about you.”

Jude took her own turn of staring out at the lake. Disassociation had always been her brain’s favorite coping mechanism. She tried to anchor herself back into the present. She looked at the brace around Emmy’s wrist. The white band of her watch. Gerald’s Sheriff of Clifton County star-shaped badge that she’d only lately pinned to her uniform.

Jude borrowed Emmy’s line. “Tell me.”

“We were talking about mistakes, and Dad said that he’d made all of his big mistakes early on. That he used to be too rigid. That he’d pushed people out of his life, but he couldn’t change what happened, and it was too late to apologize. He said he had to teach himself to be different. To learn how to forgive.”

Jude looked back at the water.

“Dad was big on forgiveness. For other people. For himself. I think what he was saying was, too much time had passed for an apology to heal things between the two of you. The way hemade up for that was to change his life. To stop drinking. To be a better person. To learn to forgive.”

The earnestness in her voice was heartbreaking, but Jude could only think about the fact that a man who’d had the strength to turn his life around, who’d staked his character on forgiveness, had given up on the daughter he’d sent away.

“I’ve been thinking about that statistic you quoted on dual child abductions, thatfewer thantwo dozen cases of double child abductions have been reported in the United States since the 1970s. You literally wrote the book on child abductions. You had to know about Cheyenne and Madison. Why didn’t you come home twelve years ago?”

“That’s a good question,” Jude said, but only to give herself a moment to come up with an answer. “Two vulnerable children were abducted. That hardly seemed like the time for a surprise Clifton family reunion. You and Dad needed to focus on building the case. I wasn’t going to exploit the situation to make it about me.”

“Okay,” Emmy said, but whether she was accepting the explanation or simply moving on was unclear. “I finally went into Dad’s office at the house.”

Jude studied her face. This didn’t have the usual feel of Emmy’s random deflections. “That must’ve been hard.”

“That’s not the point,” Emmy said. “I’m going to have to be blunt because that’s the only way I know how to say this. A few months ago, Dad asked Cole to show him how the printer works. We thought he was printing out photos, but I found his scrapbook in the filing cabinet. He’d printed out a bunch of articles about you. The last one was about how you’d finally located the Talbot girl.”

Jude felt like the world had been pulled out from under her.

“I don’t know how, but he must’ve done a deep dive on the internet. You worked really hard to keep your name out of the Freddy Henley case, but Dad found you.”

She was incapable of responding. Her father had followed her career. He had known that Jude had broken Freddy. That she had found the bodies of his victims. That she had returned all of them home.

Emmy said, “There’s more.”

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