Chapter Fifteen
She inhaled and nodded. “The first home I was sent to was so much like the one I had that I couldn’t stop crying, so they brought me back. The second … the man tried to touch me, and I told a teacher, and they pulled another girl and me out of there. Her name was Bethany, and she was there longer than I was. She and I became close in the center we lived in, and then they separated us, and I’ve never been able to find her.”
“Okay, now tell us about your time with Fowler?” Jones asked.
“I … when they got me to his house, he came out and stood in front of me and told me my life had changed. He said if I took care of him, he’d do the same with me.”
She inhaled. “He had a man of his strip me and put me in a small room. It didn’t have windows, but I could see with the light coming from the bottom of the door. No matter how much I screamed, cried, or pounded on the door, no one helped me. When the man returned, he threw a short nightgown at me and told me to put it on. I did right away. It was better than being naked. I was beaten for the first three days because I couldn’t stop crying. By the fourth, I’d shut down.”
“What does that mean?” Jones asked.
“I felt mildly angry and disgusted. It was like feeling it through a filter of some kind, but I couldn’t feel anything other than that. That was the first night he tried to rape me, but he couldn’t … he couldn’t get…”
She looked at Grey when tears willed her eyes.
“You don’t have to say it, baby. They know.”
She sniffed and turned back to the man.
“What happened when he couldn’t get an erection?” Jones asked.
She flinched at the word but didn’t look away. “He’d beat me and then tell me to go to my bed.”
Jones nodded. “Where was your bed?”
“It was a blanket on the floor in his room. He called it my dog bed.”
She could tell that Stanford was bothered by what he was hearing, but Jones seemed to be unaffected.
“How long were you there?”
“Two months and seventeen days.”
“In that time, was he able to rape you?”
She heard Grey growl, and she squeezed his hand.
“No.”
“Did he make you do anything else sexual?”
“Not to him, but he made me give a few of his friends … the mouth thing.”
Jones’s eyebrows rose. “Mouth thing?”
“Blowjobs,” Grey said.
Jones wrote a few things down.
“Did he ever talk about business in front of you?”
She nodded.
“What did you hear?”
“He has a human-trafficking business he wants to grow.”
“And you heard this?” Jones asked in shock.