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lying, I swear.”
    I shook my head and snorted. “I know you’re not lying,” I scowled at her. “I remember your brother. Besides, you look like the last person in the world who would be capable of telling a lie.”
    To my amusement, she seemed actually put out by that remark. “I can so tell a lie.” She jutted her chin at me defiantly. “I had to conceal my escape plans from everybody, for months.”
    “Oh yeah?” I asked mockingly, but curious in spite of myself. “Who’d you have to hide from?”
    “My husband,” she retorted. “My stepchildren.”
    Her voice tripped over the words, and strangely, my stomach dropped to hear them.
    To imagine her married, when she couldn’t be more than twenty-one or twenty-two… well, it’s not that she wasn’t old enough. Hell, twenty-two was practically ancient for a woman to be unmarried in the WFZ. But she just seemed so… innocent. Granted, the women I was used to being around these days looked older at eighteen than this one probably would at thirty. But still. Given what I knew about the place she had escaped, I could fill in some of the blanks of what her marriage had probably been like. And it wasn’t pretty.
    “Wait a minute,” I said, my mind fixing on something she had said. “You said your name was Cherish Holmes. But if you’re married…”
    She nodded. “My married name is Whitehead.” Her jaw set. “ Was Whitehead,” she corrected.
    I dimly remembered the name. “Which Whitehead?” I asked.
    “Isaiah,” she murmured. Her eyes grew dark, troubled, and a pang of sympathy shot through me. The Whiteheads were one of the most prominent families of the WFZ, second only to the Radleffs.
    Isaiah Whitehead, if I remembered correctly, had been a brooding, borderline sadistic asshole, the kind of bully that cults like the WFZ bred like rabbits. Their version of God’s will somehow seemed to always coincidentally line up with whatever the hell they wanted to do, anyway. Isaiah Whitehead had been about thirty or so when I left the faith. As I gazed at Cherish now, my stomach twisted at the thought of him bedding her, my fist clenching involuntarily at the idea of her forced to do her wifely duty by him.
    Women didn’t have the right to say no in the WFZ community. Their primary duty was to be entirely subservient to their husbands in all things. Judging from the fact that Cherish had chosen to run rather than stay with her husband told me I probably had a pretty accurate picture of what her marriage had been like.
    “Stepkids, you said?” I asked, noting that she hadn’t mentioned children.
    “Yes,” she nodded. “Isaiah and I did not have the… did not have children of our own.” Her face colored again at the reference to sex. Sudden anger flooded through me at the realization that she had probably never experienced it as anything but pain or unpleasant duty. I didn’t know why I cared, exactly, but it galled me that she had probably only experienced sex as pain and unpleasant obligation.
    Yes you do , an inner voice said. You know exactly why it pisses you off .
    Fuck. That fucking cult.
    I had tried so hard to get away from it and never think of that god-forsaken place again. It made me furious to have to think of that band of sick assholes again.
    Suddenly, my mind registered something else Cherish had said. “Wait,” I said. “You said your brother told you where I was?” How the hell did Elias know anything about me? And had he helped Cherish to escape?
    “No,” she shook her head. “He didn’t tell me. Not exactly.” She sighed as she ran a hand through her hair and sat back down on the picnic table. For the first time, I realized how exhausted she probably was, and how hard it must have been for her to get here, with no car and no resources.
    “Elias somehow heard through the grapevine that you had come here,” she continued tiredly. “You’re the only person I can remember who ever left and didn’t come back. You’re