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care of it.”
    “You can’t do anything,” she said. “They’ve got money.”
    “I don’t care how much money they have,” he said. “They won’t get away with this.”
    Loren wondered how long it would be until that night was no longer hovering in the back of her mind.
    And if she’d have to break her promise to Ross not to drop out.

Chapter Six
     
    Eight weeks after that night, and Loren still didn’t truly have her life back. The bleeding had, at least, finally stopped.
    Unfortunately, the resulting infection she’d gone through had left her with a lasting reminder. The initial opinion was that she likely wouldn’t be able to conceive due to the extensive scarring. But doctors had left the door open to hope, insisting that it was still too soon to tell. That medical procedures were advancing at an amazing rate. That her body might heal itself. That it was too soon to truly tell.
    It didn’t take a psychic to read between the lines. That, for now at least, it wasn’t an issue. She didn’t have a boyfriend anyway.
    Being able to get pregnant was the least of her concerns when it took every effort to just drag herself to class every day. If it hadn’t been for her parents paying her living expenses to start with, she couldn’t have stayed in the apartment with Emily. She’d told her concerned parents she’d caught mono at work and the doctors told her she couldn’t work there because of the food service, but she could attend classes. They hadn’t pressed for more details and deposited a little extra in her personal account every week for her to buy food.
    Ross, when he wasn’t working or in classes, spent as much time as he could there at the apartment with Loren.
    And she didn’t miss how he always seemed to bring groceries with him.
    Tonight, however, she was alone. It was a Wednesday night, and Emily had gone home with Mark for a family thing and wouldn’t be back until morning. Loren had double- and triple-checked the locks on the apartment door, as well as the latches on the windows in Emily’s room, her own room, and the living room.
    At least the bathroom didn’t have a window, a fact for which she was now extremely grateful.
    She tried to watch TV. They couldn’t afford cable, and the four network channels—if you counted the PBS affiliate broadcasting from the university nearby—carried nothing to hold her interest.
    She tried reading.
    Finally, around ten o’clock, she gave up and turned on the radio, low, to a classical music station and lay down in bed.
    Then she got up, locked her bedroom door, and tried again.
    Ross had promised her that, one day, she’d regain her peace of mind.
    At this rate, she’d be in her eighties before that happened.
    She’d just dozed off when something startled her awake. She wasn’t sure what, at first, until she heard it again.
    A very soft tapping on her window. Through the curtain, she saw the shadow of someone crouched on the fire escape outside.
    Scurrying backward off the bed, she fell as she felt the scream locked in her throat. The shadow was saying something, too low for her to make out in her panic as she gasped for air and scrambled to get the lock on her door unfastened.
    It was only then she realized the tapping was a familiar, soothing rhythm.
    Ross.
    Turning, she tried to peer through the small gap in the curtains from where she crouched by her bedroom door. Then she could hear him more clearly.
    “Lor. It’s me.”
    Approaching carefully, she rounded to the side of the window, trying to see past the edge of the curtains without moving them. Sure enough, it was a Ross-shaped shadowy lump perched there.
    Opening the curtains, she confirmed it.
    Her hands trembled as she got the window open and let him in.
    That’s when the smell hit her, knocking her back. “Holy crap, what have you been drinking?”
    “I haven’t.” He turned and closed and locked the window behind him, pulling the curtain closed after peering through the