Run to Me Read Online Free PDF

trusted her? When even your therapist hints it might not have happened the way you remembered . . .
    You said they came up from under the bridge, yet we found no footprints down by the creek
.
    She gripped the chisel and closed her eyes as the question she’d asked a thousand times whirred yet again inside her head. Had she suppressedwhat really happened?
    Had there really been men on the bridge that day? Had one of them actually let Jesse fall? Had she truly risked her life to save him, jumping in after him, nearly drowning? Or had she, as the police came to think but couldn’t prove, invented the story, her heroic acts, just to ease her own guilt? The guilt of a mother too distracted, too self-absorbed to notice her son wasleaning dangerously over the edge?
    We found a muddy shoeprint on the north side railing. Size four – that was your son
’
s size, wasn
’
t it?
    Just the thought it might have happened the way they implied brought the darkness bearing down on her. She could see why a parent would desperately seek to block such a truth.
    But, God help her, it wasn’t the truth! Did they honestly believe anything shethought or said or did could make the reality any easier to bear?
    She took a savage jab at the wood. The blade glanced off and found the soft flesh at the base of her thumb.
    With a cry she dropped both wood and chisel and clutched her hand. Beneath the light she surveyed the damage. Not good. Not life-threatening by any stretch, but bad enough it might require a trip to Doc Muir. A trip shewas in no condition to make, either financially or emotionally. Stupid, stupid . . .
    Unless she could patch it up herself.
    She shut off the light and left the workshop. Wind whipped her hair as she ran the short stretch to the cabin, the dark hissing forest showering her passage in twigs and swirling autumn leaves.
    Inside, however, her hoped-for reprieve was not to be had. Closer inspectionrevealed a bit of flesh protruding from the wound. Touching it felt like stroking a nerve. Even if she could bring herself to push it back in, it would never stay. And the wound would never heal as it was.
    In the pantry she got down the first aid kit and, with trembling fingers, wrapped her hand in a strip of gauze. Doctor Muir’s office. A public place. Filled with patients. Talking, staring,asking questions.
    She shoved the kit back and rested her forehead against the shelf. Trip to the doctor? She’d done it before, back before her medicine had run out. Now? In her current state? Well
that
would be progress – nowhere to hide, no deluding herself.
    Clenching her undamaged hand in a fist, she strode from the pantry. She could do it. It wouldn’t be easy, but taking the next step neverwas.
    And anyway, she had no choice.

Chapter 6
    Three holes, each as round as his finger, formed a triangle in the top of the door. When Zack saw thin rays of light stabbing through them he knew it was morning.
    The fact both heartened and terrified him. Surely they’d be letting him out soon, if only to use the toilet. But the thought of this last stretch of time in the box, when he could actually see what was around him . . . Afterall the hours he’d managed to hold himself together, why did that prospect seem so terrible?
    The cubicle had been so dark through the night, so utterly can’t-see-your-hand-in-front-of-your-face lightless, it had actually been a blessing. What he couldn’t see didn’t scare him so much. The problem had been his other senses.
    Twice he’d felt something crawling over him, the hair-fine touch of multiplelegs. Once he’d heard something scuttling about – a mouse or rat – perhaps in the walls, perhaps right there in the wood cupboard with him.
    Those moments had tested him to the limit, challenged his resolve not to break down into the whimpering baby he knew was hiding beneath the surface. He couldn’t give Tragg the satisfaction.
    Unable to stretch out, he hadn’t slept. But using a sharp edge ofrock