You shouldn't overdo it and I can't stand to see you in pain like that..."
"I'll walk on my own damn feet or I'm not going," she insisted.
Unwillingly, I helped her to her feet. My arm around her waist, her arm around my shoulder.
I watched her face, that look of fierce determination, then the pain she battled to hide as she took a step. I looked away, unable to watch. I was helping her hurt herself. Again. Oh God...
Out the front door, down the steps, down the driveway to my car. Small steps, slow steps, but she was almost there.
Maybe two metres from the car, she stopped, swung her body around and clung to me. Now I couldn't help but see the tears streaming down her face. "I can't," she gasped. "It hurts too much."
Now I thought she'd let me lift her up and carry her the rest of the way. I leaned down to sweep her legs up, but Caitlin moved closer to me so I couldn't.
"They've taken everything from me. I can't even walk. Walk to the car!" Her voice came out sounding slightly hysterical.
I turned her around, carefully, to face the front door. "They didn't take anything from you. Look how far you've come. Tomorrow, you'll get further. You get better every day. They're not here. They can't get anywhere near you. It's like you keep saying. Keep fighting. Don't let them win now."
She relaxed and wiped her eyes with her fingers. "Thank you." Her arms wrapped around me in a brief hug of gratitude that was over before I was aware of what she was doing.
Then she gritted her teeth, clutching my arm so hard her nails dug into my skin, and took those last agonising steps to the car.
I felt the tiny trickle of my own warm blood as it crept down my arm, but I didn't make a sound. Caitlin was hurting worse than I was and she'd pass out from the pain before she'd permit the scream to escape her teeth. How could I do any less?
66
When we arrived back at her house, it was immediately apparent that something was wrong. Her front door was slightly open. I knew I'd pulled it shut and locked it behind me when we'd left, yet now it was ajar.
I left Caitlin in the car while I looked over the fence into the garage. There were no cars there, but the back gate was wide open. I wanted to go around to the back of her house to investigate, but I didn't want to leave her alone and unprotected, either. Whoever had left her front door and gate open might still be here.
As if she'd read my mind, Caitlin called, "We should phone the police. I don't want to go in unless it's safe."
I glanced back at her, sitting in the passenger seat with the door open. Her feet were on the door frame, as if she was afraid to step out of the car. She hugged her knees to her chest, her face pale and her expression frightened.
She needed me. The house could wait until I had some help, I decided as I crossed the driveway to stand beside her, pulling my phone out of my pocket. I wanted to call one of our teams, or at least Navid, but I couldn't with Caitlin so close by. So, I did as she suggested and dialled the police. As the phone started to ring, I reached for her hand with my spare one.
I saw the glint of sun on metal as something fell from her hand and plinked to the paving. Her fingers cautiously grasped mine as I recognised the pocket knife I kept in the glove box, now lying open on the ground beneath the car.
When did she pull the knife from the glove box? How did she even know it was there? What was she going to do with it?
I stared at her for a moment, torn between panic and curiosity.
She looked up at me – so trusting! – and I had to drag my attention away from her to focus on what the woman on the other end of the phone line was saying.
We didn't wait long before a police car was in the driveway. Two male officers got out and approached the front door.
"Have you been inside yet?" he asked us and I shook my head.
The one who hadn't spoken pulled out a boxy item that I assumed was a Taser, but the other kept his hands free as he pushed her front door open with his shoulder.
Caitlin shivered, despite the warm day, as both police officers moved out of sight into her house. I crouched in the driveway and slid an arm around her shoulders. She leaned in closer to me, her eyes fixed on her front door, now wide open.
It was less than ten minutes before the police officers re-emerged from her house, but the wait felt interminable.
From the doorstep, the talkative one called out, "You can come in. There's no one else here," as the quiet one went around to the garage and through the open back gate, looking thoughtful.
Caitlin didn't move. She looked too stunned to protest, so I lifted her out of the car and carried her into the house. She closed her eyes as we entered the lounge room, but after a few seconds her eyes were open again, looking for some evidence of what the intruders had done.
I saw nothing different, so I put her down in an armchair before sitting in the chair closest to her. She kicked her shoes off almost immediately, bringing her knees up to curl into a little ball where she sat.
The talkative police officer pulled up a straight-backed dining chair from the next room and plonked himself down in it, across from us. Behind him, the smashed sliding door lay in pieces on the floor, except for a few jagged shards up the top. A brick that I'd seen by the back gate, presumably used to prop it open, sat on top of the broken glass.
Well, I can see how they got in, and they left by the front door, I thought, eyeing the mess on the floor of Caitlin's kitchen.
I moved my gaze from the room behind him to the police officer himself. He was close enough for me to read his name badge now, which read David... I squinted at the large number of letters in his last name, but failed to make any sense of what they spelled out, before he spoke.
He had a handheld tablet out, stylus ready. He didn't ask for our names, so he must have known who we were already. "So, you arrived how long before you called the police?"
Caitlin was silent, so I shrugged and said, "Five minutes, or less."
"How long were you gone?" He looked at Caitlin as he said it, but she didn't say a word.
I spoke up. "We left the house maybe two hours ago."
He wrote something down, before looking at Caitlin again. "Can you tell me if anything is missing?"
I opened my mouth to answer this, too, but Caitlin beat me to it. She uncurled from her foetal position, planting her feet on the floor and leaning toward him. "How do you expect me to know that, when I wasn't stupid enough to go into the house until I knew the intruder was gone?"
Both of us were stunned by her angry outburst.
Before I could react, she pushed herself out of her chair and strode over to the kitchen table. She surveyed the broken glass on the floor, gripping the table for support. She shook her head, then turned, gritting her teeth, and walked past us through the lounge room to the bedrooms.
I leapt to my feet to help her as she went past me, but she shrugged off my hand with a shake of her head and kept walking.
I followed close behind, Officer David with-the-long-last-name a few steps behind me.
The doors to all the other rooms were shut. The only open door was the one to her bedroom, so that's where she headed. Her wardrobe doors were open and so were all her drawers. There were clothes everywhere, as if they'd been looking for something. On her bed, on top of the mess of clothes, lay a big knife and a matching pair of scissors I recognised from her kitchen.
She went to the wardrobe first, opening the doors wide. A blue dress hung at an odd angle, stopping the doors from closing properly. She reached up to push the hanger back into the wardrobe, but the dress slid right off it, puddling at her feet.
She reached down and held it up. The sound that came out of her mouth was halfway between a sob and a yowl. The dress was slashed down the front in several places, so the fabric hung in tattered ribbons. If she ever wore the dress in its current state, it'd leave less to the imagination than her scanty hospital gown had.
I picked up a pair of pants on the bed, whi
ch looked like they'd been slashed with scissors. The entire crotch of the pants was cut out, from the waistband at the front all the way to the back. I dropped them again quickly before Caitlin could see them.
She started pulling items out of the wardrobe, one at a time, dropping them on the floor. Dresses, shirts, pants, skirts – almost everything she touched had been a victim of knife or scissors.
I edged away from the bed and bumped into the chest of drawers beside it. The top drawer was wide open, with something lacy hacked into pieces on top. Unable to help myself, I lifted the mess of white lace up for a better look. From the little that remained, it looked like they had once been a bra and matching knickers. Now they looked like some white elastic with scraps of lace dangling off at odd angles. What I'd give to have seen her in these when they were still intact...
The police officer stared at me, not saying a word, though he evidently wanted to say a few things. I dropped the ruined underwear back in the drawer.
Caitlin backed away from the wardrobe and sat down heavily on the bed, taking stock of the destroyed clothing strewn across it. I stumbled through the clothes on the floor to the passage outside and made it to the bathroom. In my mind's eye, I saw the drawer full of shredded lace and wondered why they'd come in and shred her clothes, but leave before she came home.
The silent police officer stood in the open bathroom doorway. He moved aside when I approached.
My eyes went to the floor of the bathroom first, but the