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The room was suddenly airless.

"You don't really want to know," I said.

"Of course I do," Marshall said. "We're never moving beyond where we are now unless I know that."

I looked at the mirror beyond Marshall's shoulder. I saw someone I didn't recognize.

"People never feel the same about me once they know," I said. My mouth was suddenly so dry, it was hard to speak.

"I will," he said.

He wouldn't. It would ruin the unspoken bond between us—a bond with which, evidently, he was no longer content.

"Why do you want me to talk about it?" My hands were clenched and I could see them shake.

"I can never get to know you better until I know that," he said with patient certainty. "And I want to get to know you better."

With one quick movement, I jerked off my T-shirt.

Under it, I was wearing a plain white sports bra. Marshall's breath hissed as he got a good look at the scars. Not meeting his eyes, I turned a little so he could see the ones that crossed my shoulders like extra bra straps; I rotated back to show him the ones that striped my upper chest; I sat up straight so he could see more thin white scars in an arc pattern descending into the waistband of my pants.

And then I looked him in the eyes.

He did not blink. His jaw was fixed in a hard line. He was making a heroic struggle to keep his face still.

"I felt them when I gripped your shoulder in class last week, but I didn't know they were so ..."

"Extensive?" I asked savagely. I would not let him look away.

"Are your breasts cut, too?" he asked, with a creditable attempt at keeping his voice neutral.

"No. But all around. In circles. In a pattern."

"Who did this?"

What had happened to me had cut my life in two, more deeply and surely than the knives that had traced bloody festoons on my skin. Unable to stop, I remembered once again, descending into a familiar hell. It had been hot that June... .

It had already been hot for a month. I had graduated from college and had been living in Memphis for three years. I had a nice apartment in east Memphis and a desk job at the city's largest maid and janitorial service, Queen of Clean. In spite of the stupid name, it was a good place to work. I was a scheduler.

I also did spot checks on site and made courtesy calls to customers to see if they were satisfied. I earned a decent salary, and I bought a lot of clothes.

When I left work that Tuesday in June, I was wearing a short-sleeved navy blue dress with big white buttons down the front and white leather pumps. My hair was long and light brown then, and I prided myself on my long, polished fingernails. I was dating one of the co-owners of a bottled-water supply company.

My worst problem was the transmission of my car, which had already required extensive repairs. When I left work, I began to worry that it was going to eat up more of my money.

The car made it down the freeway to the Goodwill Road exit before I had to stop. There was a service station in sight on Goodwill, and lots of traffic, people everywhere. I walked down the exit ramp, nervous about how narrow it seemed when it had to accommodate a woman on foot and cars. Unexpectedly, a van coming slowly down the ramp stopped beside me. I thought, They're going to offer me a ride to the service station.

The passenger door was thrown open by someone sitting in the back, who immediately retracted into his crouch behind the passenger's seat. The man in the driver's seat was holding a gun.

When I accepted it for what it was, rather than trying to imagine it was something else, my heart began racing, its thud so loud, I could hardly make out what he was saying.

"Get in or I'll shoot you where you stand."

I could jump off the exit ramp and get hit by a car speeding on the road below, or I could tell him to shoot, or I could get in the van.

I made the wrong decision. I got in.

The man who had picked me up, I found out later, was an accomplished kidnapper named Louis Ferrier, called "Nap" by his customers in acknowledgment of his expertise in stealing women and children, most of whom vanished forever. The abducted victims who did resurface were without exception dead, either mentally or physically. Nap had done jail time, but not for his specialty.

I was handcuffed the minute I got in the van by the man crouched behind the passenger's seat, an occasional accomplice of Nap's named Harry Wheeler. Harry reached around the seat, grabbed my hands, cuffed them, and held the chain that led from the cuffs. Then he blindfolded me. The windows of the van were heavily tinted. No one noticed.

During that dreadful ride out of Memphis, they just talked as if I wasn't there. I was in such a state of terror, I hardly knew what they said. I could feel death sitting in my lap.

At the end of the ride, which had led north from Memphis, Nap and Harry exited the highway and met with a representative of a biker gang at a prearranged rendezvous. Nap had rented me to the gang for one night, though I didn't know that.

Four men and one woman took me to an abandoned shack in the middle of some fields. One of the men had grown up around there and was familiar with the place. They attached the chain through my handcuffs to the metal head rail of an old cot. I was still blindfolded. The men drank, ate, and raped me. When that got old, they used the knife on my chest. They cut a circle around the base of each breast. They cut zigzags in the flesh covering my chest. They cut a target on my stomach, with my navel as the bull's-eye. They laughed as they did this, and I, chained to a dilapidated bed, screamed and screamed, until they slapped me and told me to stop or the knife would go deeper. And they raped me again.

The woman said very little during all this. I refused to believe, at first, that a woman could be present and not help me. When I realized the softer voice did indeed belong to a woman, I pleaded with her and begged her for help. I got no reply, but during a time when the men all seemed to be sleeping or outside urinating, the woman's voice came close to my ear and said, "I lived through it. You can, too. They're not cutting you bad. You haven't lost anything but a little blood."

I had not known that Nap was supposed to return for me, that I had been rented, not sold. I expected to die when the men tired of me and were ready to leave; I had had eighteen hours to anticipate my death.

I'd attached the name Rooster to the largest man. Rooster had a wonderful idea as they packed up their gear the next day. He had a cheap little revolver he'd picked up on the street, and he left it with me. He also left me one bullet.

"Now, you can use this on yourself," he said genially. "Or you can save it for Nap, when he comes back to get you, and use it on him. I figure it'll take you from now till he gets here to learn how to use it."

"Be better if we killed her ourselves," said a voice I hadn't attached to a name or weight.

"But look at it this way," urged Rooster. "If she kills Nap, we can always say she wanted to have sex with us, if worse comes to worst and somehow she finds us, though that ain't likely. But if we kill her, Nap'll come after us when we least expect it. Ain't you kind of sick of him? I know I am."

This made good sense to the rest. Leaving me with a gun appealed to their sense of humor, too. As they left, they were laughing over Nap's surprise, and placing bets over whether or not I would choose to kill him or myself.

For some minutes after I heard the motorcycles buzz down the dirt road to rejoin the blacktop, I lay in a stupor. I could not believe I was still alive. I didn't know if I was glad or not. I wondered how long I would survive, with the wounds I had. My vaginal area was at best badly bruised; at worst, I had internal rips. I was oozing blood from the cutting, and the pain was dreadful, though I knew the cuts were not deep.