He sighs, as if fighting with himself on how much to tell me. “I had an old friend on the force do me a favour and look into her past.” He shakes his head. “This shit is fucked up. I’m not sure you really want to hear it.”
“Just tell me,” I say quietly.
“She lost most of her family when she was eight.” My heart squeezes like it’s been put in a vice. She hadn’t been lying to me when she told me a bit about her past.
“A house fire,” I murmur.
Isaac shakes his head. “Man, I wish it were that simple. Triple murder suicide. Mum lost the plot and killed Dad and two of the kids. Chloe and her brother were spared, only because they weren’t home.”
“Holy fucking shit,” I gasp. That poor fucking kid. I can’t imagine the kind of trauma that would’ve caused her.
“It gets worse,” Isaac warns me. “The kids went into the system, where her foster father sexually abused her.” Isaac grips the edge of the bar, and his knuckles go white as his arms flex. The way he won’t meet my eyes, I know there’s more to come. I steel myself against the details, reconsidering my stance on having a drink.
“Sure you don’t want that beer?” he asks, as if reading my mind.
I shake my head. Drinking will only cloud my thoughts, and right now, I need my mind to be as clear as possible. “Did they catch him?”
“She suffered horrendous, daily abuse at the hands of this monster.” He leans forward, resting his elbows on the bar, his dark eyes blazing. “We’re talking physical, emotional, sexual…the whole shebang.” His voice lowers slightly. “Right up until the night she killed him.”
“She killed him?” I echo, shocked.
Isaac nods. “The theory is her brother, Jake, walked in on him raping her and he tried to stop him. There was a scuffle, and Jake was killed. Her brother died trying to protect her from that fucking monster. Chloe lost the plot and stabbed her foster father to death.”
His dark eyes shine with pity through the hardness of his stance. Isaac has seen some shit, but I get the feeling that this is a lot, even for him. He lifts up a thick file and slides it across the bar to me.
“What’s this?” I get a grip on the folder, but Isaac’s not letting go just yet.
“A complete copy of her file. Everything from the crime scene to her time at the psych facility. Please don’t ask me how I got it and be warned, it’s pretty graphic.”
He still isn’t letting go, telling me just how big a deal him giving me this information is. Isaac might not be on the force anymore, but he’s always played by the rules. No doubt he has a contact that works at the place, but I don’t give a damn how he got a hold of the information. I want to read every damn word, cover to cover, backward and forward, until I know everything there is to know about Chloe.
“I won’t ask.”
His fingers loosen on the file, and it slips through his grasp as I place it in front of myself and open it. A photo of a young Chloe is the first thing I see. She looks around eight, which means it was likely taken just before she entered the foster care system.
As I turn page after page, devouring every scrap of information there is about Chloe, my heart aches for her. The file is too thick for someone so young; it’s just not possible she’s had to suffer through all of this. I find her mugshot from the night she was arrested. She looks around twelve in the photo, the emptiness in her eyes, the tears streaking down her face, almost enough to make me hurl.
Fuck, I want to ruin that fucker for laying a finger on her. If she hadn’t have killed him, I’d be hunting him down myself and ripping this guy apart with my cold, bare hands.
“How was it not self-defence considering the abuse she’d been subjected to?” I wonder, as much to myself as to Isaac.
He shrugs. “That’s just it. She may have snapped, but the complete overkill made it hard for her to plead self-defence. She was in bad shape when they found her.” He turns the page to show me what he means. Serious mental health issues, severe trauma from excessive abuse, psychosis, PTSD…the list goes on. “When they found her…she thought her brother was still alive and physicallywithher. She was deemed unfit for trial and sent to a psychiatric facility.”
I stare at the file again, his words finally registering.
Her dead brother…
She thought he was still alive and with her.
I suspected there was something…off. But this? Never in a million years did I think something like this might have happened to her.
“They released her from the facility when she turned eighteen?” I ask. “That was only a few weeks ago.”
Right about when she entered my life.
“Yes. With a lot of therapy and time, she showed remarkable improvement. At the time of her release, she was considered a normal, fully functioning young woman who understood right from wrong, ready to be integrated back into society.”
Struggling to process everything, I shift on the bar stool, my mind in overdrive. The young woman who’d broken into my home and held my daughter had lost almost her entire family in the most violent of ways. Then, just when she probably thought things couldn’t get worse, her innocence was stolen from her, along with her sense of safety, and finally, her brother was taken from her. That kind of trauma has to have had an effect on someone.