“Hello Mr. Beretti,” I said, meeting my former foster father’s eyes without flinching. Then I turned to his noxious wife. “Mrs. Beretti,” I muttered, nodding in her direction.

Her thin lips curled up like she smelled something bad. She looked down her nose at me as though I were still a troubled fourteen-year-old girl. A fourteen-year-old girl she allowed to be victimized under her own roof.

In some ways I hated Mrs. Beretti more than I could ever hate her husband. She knew exactly what her husband was doing yet would always look the other way. Choosing to blame the young girls in her home for his predatory transgressions.

I had spent two years in their home. It was the longest I had lived anywhere since entering the foster care system at the age of five. And I had loathed and despised every minute of it. If it hadn’t been for Dania’s constant presence, I would have possibly murdered them both in their sleep and not thought twice about it.

“You look good, Eleanor. It seems that life is treating you well,” Mr. Beretti purred, oozing slime, his beady eyes lingering on my body in a way that was all too familiar. He looked the exact same as he had the last time I had seen him. His hair may now be grey and he had clearly put on some weight, but he still wore that same greedy expression. As though I were candy he wanted to devour.

“It’s Ellie. My name is Ellie,” I corrected, trying to loosen the death grip I had on my grocery basket so I wouldn’t hit him in the head with it.

Mr. Beretti had always insisted on calling me Eleanor. It wasn’t my real name and no one I met had ever called me Eleanor before. But he felt that Eleanor was a suitable name for such a beautiful girl. At first I thought it was sort of nice but that was until it became sordid and ugly.

He liked to call me Eleanor when forcing me to touch him. It became a curse on his lips.

I would never be able to hear the name again without wanting to throw up.

Or kill someone.

“How are you?” he asked, ignoring my defiant pronouncement.

“I graduated from college,” I spit out, not sure what possessed me to share any piece of information with him. Only that I wanted him to know that I had done something with my life. Something that neither he nor his wife would have thought me capable of. Something good.

I didn’t want to prove anything to Mr. Beretti. I hated the man. But I needed him to know that he hadn’t destroyed me. That no one had. No matter how hard they had tried.

Mrs. Beretti snorted, and I looked at her. She really was a sad woman. Hideously unattractive and desperately trying to hold onto a sick man with criminal appetites. A man who looked at everyone else, including his foster children, rather than at her.

“What’s so funny about that?” I demanded, my voice rising. I knew I was close to making a scene, yet I couldn’t stop myself.

Mrs. Beretti’s cold eyes appraised me and clearly found me lacking. She didn’t need to say a word. Her thoughts and feelings were written all over her face. They were broadcasted loud and clear.

You are nothing.

“Arnold, we have to get going,” Mrs. Beretti said, turning away from me and pulling on her husband’s arm. It was then that I noticed a girl, no more than thirteen, beside them. She stood behind Mrs. Beretti, almost cowering in her shadow.

She appeared timid and meek. Nothing like the girl I had been at her age. But I could see the strain of living with the Berettis on her despondent face. It was an expression I could identify with.

“It was good seeing you again, Eleanor. Wasn’t it, Mable?” Mr. Beretti said, his eyes searing and heated, trying to exert the power he used to have over me. He wanted me to feel scared and small. He was a bully and a pervert, and it disgusted me to know that they were still fostering kids.

Mrs. Beretti didn’t say anything. She glared at me with a look of pure hatred. When I had first gone to live with them I had briefly hoped that she would become a mother figure. I had been so desperate for one that I would have accepted any substitute. But this woman, so vicious and hateful, wasn’t capable of loving anyone but her pedophilic husband. She was just as sick as he was.

“Come on, Cheyenne,” Mr. Beretti said, putting his hand on the young girl’s arm. I watched as Cheyenne flinched but didn’t pull away. She looked trapped. Like a rabbit in a snare with no way out.

I knew that girl.

I had been that girl.

And I hated being reminded of her with these people as my witness.

After the Berettis disappeared down the aisle, I hurried to the checkout wanting to get out of the store as fast as I could.

When I was back in my car, grocery bags in hand, I sagged against the seat. I didn’t realize I was shaking until I put the keys in the ignition. I sat in the car for a long time, the engine idling, unable to pull out of the parking lot.

I watched as the Berettis left the IGA, with poor Cheyenne trailing behind them, looking so much like fourteen-year-old Ellie McCallum.

What was I doing here?

Why had I come back?

I didn’t want to be here.

I didn’t want to live with the chance of running into the very people I had tried so hard to forget.

I didn’t want to know that I could see Dania on the street or the Berettis in the grocery store. I didn’t want to have to crawl back with my pride in tatters for a job at JACs.

I thought on that day that I had packed my car and drove out of Wellston that I had made my break.

And I had believed when I came back to be with Flynn that things were different.

I was different.