I Sent Him to Prison, Now I'm Falling for His Brother novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Station at Two A.M.
Nadine walks into the police station after the assault and refuses to sleep on it; her best friend arrives, and the Staffords' lawyer is already downstairs asking for her by name.
At two in the morning I walked into the county police station with my dress torn at the shoulder.
I was eighteen, and a drunk stranger had just raped me in an upstairs bathroom.
The desk sergeant looked up from his coffee.
"Rough night, sweetheart?"
"I need to report a rape," I said.
My voice came out flat and loud in the empty lobby.
He looked at my dress, then at the clock.
"Were you drinking tonight?"
"One beer. Before he did it."
"Whose party?"
"Some lake house. I don't know whose."
He sighed and rubbed his eyes.
"Tell you what. Go home, sleep on it, and if you still feel this way tomorrow, come back and we'll talk."
"No."
"Honey, these things look different in the morning."
"It looks the same to me now as it will then."
I sat down in the plastic chair by his desk and put my hands flat on my knees so he couldn't see them shake.
"I'm not leaving. Somebody take my statement."
He stared at me for a long moment.
Then he picked up the phone and said, "Send Detective down."
While we waited, I did not cry.
I stared up at the ceiling tiles instead.
White squares, water-stained at the seams.
The front doors banged open at ten past two, and Brinley came running in with her shoes in her hand.
My best friend since the third grade.
She dropped to her knees in front of my chair and grabbed both my hands.
"Nadine, oh my God. I've been calling you for an hour. Somebody said you left crying and I went out of my mind."
"I'm okay."
"You are not okay."
She was crying for me, big tears, her mascara running.
I loved her so much right then that I forgot how to be scared.
"Tell me who it was," she said.
"I don't know his name. A tall guy. Drunk. He followed me up the stairs and locked the bathroom door."
"The upstairs bathroom," Brinley said softly. "The one I sent you to."
"You said there was no line up there."
"There wasn't," she said, and squeezed my hands tighter. "I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry, Nad. This is my fault."
"It isn't."
"I'm staying right here with you. The whole time. I promise."
The detective came down the hall then, a tired woman with a legal pad and a cardigan the color of oatmeal.
She led us into a small room with a table bolted to the floor.
"Do you want your friend in here?"
"Yes," I said.
Brinley sat beside me and kept her hand on my back.
"Start from the beginning," the detective said. "Take your time. A nurse is on her way for the exam."
So I told her.
I told her about the beer I'd had on the dock with Brinley.
I told her how a man in a white shirt had stood too close at the kitchen counter and asked my name, and I had given a fake one.
I told her how I went up the stairs alone.
I said the words out loud, every one of them, in plain order.
What he did, where, for how long, and that I said no, and that I said it again.
The detective wrote steadily and never once looked at me with pity.
Brinley made a small sound beside me and looked away.
"Do you want to stop?" the detective asked.
"No."
"Do you understand that if you sign this, it becomes a criminal case? You'll be asked about it in front of strangers. Possibly a jury. Possibly for years."
I thought about my mother asleep at home, believing I was at a sleepover.
I thought about the hands that had held me down.
"I understand."
"Nadine," Brinley said gently, "maybe we should wait for your mom. Just so you're sure."
"I'm sure."
"Okay," she whispered. "Okay. I'm with you."
I picked up the pen.
My hand was steady for the first time all night.
So I signed my name on every page.
The detective gathered the pages and tapped them straight.
Then she stopped and looked at the door, where a uniformed officer had been standing for a minute, waiting to be noticed.
"What is it?"
"Ma'am, there's a lawyer in the lobby," the officer said.
"At two-thirty in the morning?"
"He says he represents the Stafford family. He says he's here about the incident at the lake house."
The detective's eyes moved to me.
"And," the officer added, "he asked for Miss Corwin by name."
I had not told anyone my real name.
Not the man at the counter, not the sergeant, not the detective until a minute ago.
I felt Brinley's hand go still on my back.
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