Eve remained on the couch in a state of shock for quite some time. Iris had tried to turn off the television, but Eve wouldn’t let her. The news kept on replaying the story like they couldn’t get enough of it. It was all Eve could do to not rewind and replay the moment Ethen stepped into the cop car over and over again. She hadn’t focused completely on what they were saying about him or what he allegedly did, but she caught snippets of it in her cloudy state. She knew they were trying to make it so he would not be able to post bail; because of his immense wealth, they called him a flight risk. That he had never filed a missing person’s report. Whatever the new evidence was, they weren’t sharing it with the public yet. They would keep it close to the chest until the trial if they could. It would allow for shock value, giving them the likelihood that the jury would be more apt to react in their favor and convict him. Eve didn’t realize until her palms started to bleed again that she had unknowingly pressed her fingernails deeply into them. She had not done that in a long time.

It wasn’t hard to speculate what they had on him, though; there were a million different things it could be. Fingerprints, new DNA evidence, a witness stepping forward, a paper trail that they hadn’t been able to follow until now. The possibilities were endless. Whatever they had was falsified, Eve was sure of that. She wished that Ethen had not wiped his blackmail from the drives. It only increased his appearance of guilt. If only he had left it there, Eve could have easily used it to prove his innocence. As she thought about this, she once again began to fret over the idea that maybe the information wasn’t falsified. Maybe it was possible that whatever new evidence they had was incriminating – because he was a criminal.

Eve tried to shake the thought from her mind but was unsuccessful. She felt her stomach churn with nauseating rumbles. Iris must have noticed the slight shift in her discomfort as she stood from the table where she was sitting and walked over to the couch. She sat next to Eve and pulled her into her arms. Finally, Eve broke into tears. She sobbed against Iris, wanting nothing more than to fall asleep and wake up from this nightmare. Iris shushed her gently, running her hand through her hair and rocking her. It was as though Eve had become a child and Iris her mother. They often switched roles like this, both used to playing protector and protected. They didn’t have anyone else to do this for them, so they made due with each other.

“We’ve been through worse than this,” Iris whispered to Eve as she cried into her friend’s shoulder. Unfortunately, this was very true; both of them had been through far worse than this and at far too young of an age. Iris and Eve had met when they were in school and became instant best friends. They recognized something in the other that made their connection stronger than that of any other kids in their grade.

Iris had come up to Eve at the end of a long day. Eve had missed the bus home and was sitting on the curb looking anxious as ever. Iris sat down next to her and asked if she had missed the bus too. At first, Eve wasn’t interested in conversing at all; she was far too preoccupied with how her parents would react to her arriving late from school. She’d have to walk the five miles home now; there was no possibility that she would be able to call and ask for a ride. Charlie might have been able to drive her, but he had practice and she didn’t want him to get in trouble either. Their parents would have been able to turn it on him if they wanted to. They didn’t need a reason, they could blame her and Charlie for the color of the sky. It wasn’t until Iris shared how mad her mother was going to be that she missed that bus that Eve paid attention to the girl sitting beside her. In that moment, they had recognized silently that they both came from abusive homes. Eve nodded in agreement and told Iris that she was worried about how both her parents would react. There was a way that they said it that clued the other in without having to actually say the words. It was at this point that the young Eve subtly showed the cigarette burn fresh on her wrist. She did this as if it was a calling card of some kind, an identifier she could use to see if Iris understood. Sadly, Iris did and lifted her shirt to show a large welt and bruise on her stomach.

Agreeing that they could never call home for a ride, both of them began the long walk. Luckily for them, they lived in the same direction and were able to walk together most of the way. The next day the two ate lunch together and played during recess, solidifying the friendship that would last longer than anyone expected.

Eve was lucky enough to have her brother. He protected her from the brunt of their parent’s abuse. When she was younger, he was always there to take the hit. As Charlie got older, he tried to stay out of the house as much as possible. He took up sports, and study groups, anything that he could do to get out, he did. He wanted to be home to protect Eve, but he couldn’t forever. He worried that if he kept on taking the hits, he would end up dead. That one day the hit would be too hard and he would be gone forever. Iris didn’t have anyone to protect her or anyone for her parents to turn their anger towards. She was stronger than Charlie or Eve, just in her nature. Her parents had nothing to do with her strength. She was strong in spite of them. It was Charlie and Eve that made her strong, though neither realized this. Before she met Eve, she had no one in her life to protect her. Afterwards, she had two people. They may not have been there to stop the belt from hitting her flesh, but they helped keep her together after it happened.

“It’s all my fault,” Eve sobbed into Iris. She had not cried like this in years. Her tears came with ferocity and she could barely get the words out. It was as if she had opened the floodgates to a lifetime’s worth of tears. “It’s all my fault,” she repeated. Iris whispered that it wasn’t her fault at all, but instead of comforting, Eve found the comment infuriating. She could not understand how Iris didn’t see that everything that had happened to her and Ethen today had been her fault, and on top of that everything painful that she and Iris had been through came down on her shoulders. She had committed no crime but wanted to stand trial just so she could hear someone confirm how guilty she was. Eve pushed Iris away and stood up from the couch.

“Of course, it’s my fault!” she yelled. Everything was her fault. She had been the one to start looking into the mob story. She had done this despite the fact that her boss had told her explicitly to stop. It was her own vendetta against the mob that had started all of this. Now they knew where Iris lived and that she was involved in the story somehow. They had taken Ethen from his home, plastering his face all over the news for his boy to see. If she had just left it alone, she would have avoided all this. “I couldn’t let it go.” She let out another sob and, though it seemed as though she was referring to the story, Iris knew she was talking about something completely different.

In their last year of college, Eve had fallen in with a really rough crowd. Finally, she and Iris had escaped their abusive homes only for Eve to end up in an abusive relationship. It wasn’t like that at first. At first, she and Danny were so desperately in love it was almost sickening. He was sweet and kind, protective—just the kind of guy Eve deserved. Then it was like something switched. Eve started showing up to class late, or not at all. She was wearing long-sleeved shirts even on the hotter days of spring. Iris recognized the signs immediately.

When Iris confronted Eve about it, Eve confessed that he had started hitting her. His initially protective nature had become controlling. He wouldn’t let her leave his apartment until he said so, making her miss classes and shifts at work. This bothered her more than the bruises did because he was making her miss the things that would allow her to one day flourish in the world. Essentially it was psychological torture. Iris couldn’t understand why Eve would let that happen to her again and was even hurt that she hadn’t told her what was going on. It wasn’t until she got Eve to tell her the whole story that she understood why.

Danny was in the mob. He was low level but had enough clout that if he wanted something done or taken care of, he could make it happen. With the threat against Iris’ welfare, Eve would endure anything she had to if it meant keeping her safe. Eve didn’t know how she was supposed to leave Danny. It would nearly be a suicide mission; she’d be a kamikaze pilot flying to her own death. This did not matter to her as much as Iris’ life did and she knew both of them would be in danger if that was the case. She and Iris hatched a plan to get her away from him, but it required both parties to go into hiding. Eve was adamant that they stay long enough to graduate and they did, although Eve only barely pushed through.

Their plan was moved up in the timeline after a particularly violent outburst from Danny. He left Eve with a black eye, broken ribs and a broken arm. He had twisted it so far behind her back it snapped. At the hospital, the doctors who tended to her all knew what had happened, but unless she admitted to it, they couldn’t do much to help her. One particularly tough nurse refused to allow Danny in the room with Eve, which Eve would be forever grateful for. Once they tended to all of Eve’s injuries and set her arm, she managed to slip out of the hospital without Danny seeing her. If that nurse hadn’t helped her by keeping them separated, she never would have made it out of her relationship alive.

Eve had left the hospital and called Iris to pick her up. They needed to make themselves disappear. Danny had made it very clear to her what his tough guys would do to both of them if Eve ever left him. The threat against Iris’ life was what made her stay with him for so long. With his connections to the mob, they knew they would have to go underground to ever be able to evade him, so that’s what they did. Eve and Iris moved across the country, to a small town where no one knew them and they didn’t know anyone. They gave fake names to everyone they came across, only dealt in cash transactions and constantly looked over their shoulders.

They made their little townhome, making friends and working the entire time. After about a year, they got a little too comfortable in their false lives. After many fights and debates, they finally agreed to return to their real world. If a year wasn’t long enough, then no amount of time would be and the best thing for Eve to do would be to testify in order to put Danny behind bars. Eve hoped that it wouldn’t come to that. Iris longed to return to real life, and it was because of this that Eve agreed to come out of hiding. They had compromised and agreed to move to a new city to start over, but where they could be themselves and not be so concerned with covering their tracks all the time.

Somehow, by some stroke of luck or miracle, Danny had not found them in their new lives. Iris was able to adjust better than Eve. She truly came out of hiding, where Eve still hid herself away in different ways than they had before. She still constantly felt like Danny was only one credit card transaction away from finding her. When Eve started to make the mob connection in her story, she couldn’t stop herself from looking into it obsessively. She wondered how many of those hits were ordered by or maybe even executed by Danny. It was a ridiculous notion to think he might be in the same city as she was at this point, but she couldn’t shake the feeling. Logic told her he couldn’t have been involved, but her emotions didn’t care. They made the connection between the mob and Danny; they had become one and the same at this point. Her anger and disgust with Danny extended to the entirety of the mob and would not be quelled until she could prove her theory.

That was the real reason she couldn’t stop her obsession with the missing person’s cases she was looking into. It wasn’t that she cared that people were going missing and no one seemed to make the necessary connections to figure out who was responsible. It was her own selfish vendetta against a man who likely wasn’t even involved. She hated him, but she hated herself more. At the end of the day she had known how bad he was for her from the first moment they met. Her stupidity had taken a year of her life away, but even worse, it had taken a year from Iris as well. Now her obsession with the mob case had resulted in her getting run down, Iris was once again in danger and Ethen had been placed in prison. Eve knew that Ethen’s situation was not her fault in entirety, but she still couldn’t help but take some of the blame. Had she been more careful and not called him in her impatience, Melcor might have still believed that he was in negotiations with his board.

“It’s not your fault,” Iris said with an edge to her voice that Eve didn’t expect. “That is what everyone our entire lives has trained us to believe, but it’s not. My mother, your parents, they taught us to believe that every hit, kick or burn was because of us. That they were punishing us because we did something wrong, but we never did. We cannot keep taking responsibility for the terrible things that other people have done to us.”

Iris had never spoken so candidly about their past before. Even when they were kids, where Eve would share every detail of her abuse with Iris, Iris would only say one or two words. She would rather pretend that it was not happening and in the moments that she was away from her mother, she wanted to focus on anything but what was waiting for her at home. Iris looked fierce as she stared at Eve.

“Maybe I’m a bad luck charm,” Eve said after a moment of silence. She hated the pity party she was having for herself. Eve knew how annoying and frustrating she was being, but she could not stop herself.

Iris shook her head no. “You are not bad luck. You are the only thing that got me through. I would have been dead by now if we hadn’t met, so to me, you are the luckiest charm in the world.” The words touched Eve deeply. She had always felt like Iris saved her, she had never thought that she might have done the same thing for her. Charlie was her savior and then when he left, Iris was the only one who was there for her.

Eve knew the truth of what Iris was saying and felt much the same about her. “Thank you,” she said, not knowing what else to say. She meant it, and she understood what Iris was saying about not taking the blame for everyone else’s actions. That didn’t mean she no longer felt the guilt of it. Unlearning that would take a lifetime, but the words were still comforting to hear. Eve sat next to Iris on the couch once more. She had calmed herself down. Eve was an idea person; she always had to find a solution to the problem at hand. In this situation, she had no clue how to fix it. “What am I going to do?” she asked.

“We’ll figure it out,” Iris said with a comforting smile. Iris was able to look for a solution to everything. She was a positive force in the world, always ready to take on the next issue. To tackle the next problem. It was admirable, and Eve tried to be the same way. This was a different situation though, she couldn’t figure out where to go from here. Everything seemed to be crashing around her and she couldn’t see the light.