Page 113 of Most Eligible Billionaire

“You didn’t pay very good attention.”

“I was in college.”

“Ihidin a well as part of my plot to destroy Denny’s future. I pretended I fell in there. Three days I was in there. All the better to get media attention. It’s what I wanted all along.”

There’s this long silence. “So this is what you’re going to do?” he finally says. “Don’t I get the real story?”

I ball my hands to keep them from trembling. Strangely, I don’t want to tell him the real story. It’s easier to let him think the worst. Because I so badly want him to believe—so badly. I gamble less of my heart if I don't tell.

“I thought you trusted me,” he says.

I regard him with bleary eyes.

“Tell me.”

I look at my kitten-heel shoes, maroon with a little sparkle.It’ll hurt too much when you don’t believe me.

“It’s me,” he says, voice so achingly tender. “Just you and me.”

And I’m thinking of being in the elevator shaft with him, how amazing he was. And the little griffin he carved me. And the buildings he dreams of making. He’s an idealist. In a world of people shooting at targets, he’s shooting at the stars. He’s making bridges from bits of string.

And suddenly I’m telling him.

I tell him about the high school party. Keg, bonfire, music, the usual. I’d wandered off, bored, not drunk enough to think my way drunker friends were funny.

That’s when Denny abducted me. He was a few years older—a year out of high school. He sealed my mouth with his giant hand and dragged me into his trunk. To his hunting cabin. I woke up terrified, half naked, with Denny coming at me.

“Fuck,” Henry bites out. “I shoulda killed him in there.”

My fingers close over his arm. He believes me?

“Don’t worry, I won’t really kill him.Maybe. Then what?” He pulls me to him, more tightly.

“I always think it was my terror of him that made him ejaculate all over my shirt instead of getting to the final act. Like my terror turned him on.”

I feel him tense. I pause. “Keep going,” he says. “You’re okay. We’re okay.”

I tell him how Denny stormed off, and I thought for sure he was going to come back with an ax to chop me up.

“Left you there.”

“Yeah. And something in me kicked in, working at that knot. I freed myself even as his boots crunched the gravel outside. I grabbed my panties and my shoes and ran out the back, pounding feet over cutting branches. I barely felt it. I just had to get away.”

“In bare feet. Through the woods.”

“I hardly felt it until I fell into that well. It was deep, but I only sprained my right ankle and broke the toe of my left. It could’ve been worse, but the thing was filled with years of brush and leaves and dirt, and that cushioned my fall.”

I tell him about hiding myself under the leaves at the bottom of the well when Denny looked in with a flashlight. I hid even when the first wave of searchers came through. That was damning for me in the trial, that they looked in the well and saw nobody. Why hide? But I was scared. I thought it was Denny and his friends, come to get me.

When things got quiet, I really did try to climb out, but I couldn’t. Even without the pain of my injuries, I couldn’t. The sides were slimy and high, and there was nothing to hold on to. And it was so dark.

I tell him how I buried myself in the debris at the bottom and hid. Terrified.

“That’s why you stayed quiet.”

“Three days I was in there.” All the while I was becoming famous. Vonda O’Neil. Disappeared from a teen party in the woods, the stuff of fairy tales, but there were no bread crumbs. No bowls of porridge. No baby-bear beds.

I go on with my story. How I was in shock by the time they pulled me out—that’s what the nurse told me. Half out of my mind. I told my story to the cops. Denny tried to rape me but he didn’t, and I got away. After a quick visit to the hospital, I was released to my mom, with all my dirty clothes in a bag.

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