Yet this is not a fugue, this most recent flight from my life. For the first time maybe, I am sure of who I am and what I must do. This has been a purposeful escape to protect my daughter from mistakes that I have made, to protect her from the woman I have been. If I can’t do that, then she’s better off without me.The boat is pitching horribly now, and I cling to the rail on the wall as I make my way back to my cabin. The wind is wailing, and I think of Dax on his little boat and wonder how he is faring in the big waters and if he’ll survive, if he’ll come back for me. My stomach is in full mutiny, and I hold back vomit as I move through the door, pull it closed behind me, and resume my crouch in the small triangle of space that will be created when the door swings open. I listen to the wind and the churning water.It isn’t long before I hear the thrum of a powerful boat engine, then footfalls on the deck above me. I take the gun from my

“He was gone most of the time,” Gray said of his father. “And when he was home, he was this brooding presence. Sullen, staring at the television or angry at my mother for something she’d bought or had done to the house while he was gone. I hovered around him, wanting and fearing his attention. Occasionally I’d get these quick pats on the back or we’d try to play catch or build a tree house, something that fathers and sons might do together. But it was never quite right. We always walked away feeling like we’d failed at something indefinable. We just couldn’t connect, not really. Not ever.”He used to spend time talking to me like this, even when he thought I might not be able to hear him or that I didn’t care. He’d sit in my room at the psychiatric hospital in New Jersey where he’d admitted me as Annie Fowler and talk. I’d stare off into space, not responding. I wasn’t exactly catatonic, but I

They told me that I left myself behind that night when I got into that black sedan with Marlowe, that Lolita ceased to exist and a new girl took her place. So who am I now? I remember wondering as Gray shouldered the bag filled with the things he bought for me and we walked through the automatic doors into the cold parking lot. Am I Annie Fowler or Lolita March or someone else entirely? Two and a half years of my life were gone.I got into the black Suburban and wrapped my arms around myself against the cold. I was shivering, from cold, from fear. On the day I left Frank Geary’s horse ranch, I was seventeen, nearly eighteen. On the day I left the hospital with Gray, my twenty-first birthday was just three months away.Gray turned on the heat, and we sat for a while in the car. I was scared. I didn’t know who I was or what I was going to do with myself now. But I stayed quiet. I couldn’t afford to show any weakness.“I know a

I wanted to tell him that it couldn’t be true, though I’d read this much. I don’t think I could have witnessed these crimes and done nothing, but the truth was, I didn’t know for sure.“A few weeks earlier, a witness, a stock boy Geary left for dead in the back room, said he saw you. He was badly wounded, unable to help the girl Geary was torturing. All he could do was listen to her screams, thinking he was about to die himself. He said you were virtually catatonic, that you sat in a corner and rocked, gnawing on your cuticles. That Geary led you out when he was done. You went with him like a child.”I covered my face in shame. I hated to think of myself this way, weak and in a killer’s thrall, just like my mother.“Up till then I wasn’t sure. Your mother said you went with Geary willingly. But your father said when you came to New York that you weren’t right, you weren’t the girl he knew. He said

I have often wondered about the other women, a suspected thirteen in all. Women who went missing in a twenty-mile radius around the Geary home whose bodies were never found. What happened to them? Did they all die at the hands of Frank Geary?“You didn’t answer my question,” the host said when the audience quieted down. “How do you explain your daughter’s involvement with Marlowe Geary?”“I won’t speak ill of the dead. But my stepson was a good, good boy. I knew him to be gentle and kind. Lolita was a very troubled young girl, headstrong and unhappy.”“So what are you saying?” asked the host, incredulous.“If he did anything wrong, she might have been the corrupting influence,” my mother said, widening her eyes and looking straight at the camera again.I was stunned by the injustice of her words, the absolute delusional world she lived in. But still I couldn’t turn