"Natalie?" Jessica knocked gently on the bedroom door, leaning her forehead against the door as she waited in vain for a response. "Natalie, please let me in. I just want to help."

Jessica stood there for what seemed like an hour, intermittently knocking and calling out to her sister, before she finally heard movement on the other side of the door. Stepping back, she waited as Natalie unlocked and slowly opened the door. As had been the case many times over the last two months, she found herself struck by how small and scared Natalie looked, completely different than the self-confident woman she'd traded punches with just a few months earlier.

"What do you want?" Natalie asked, stepping back slightly as Jessica stepped into the room uninvited.

Jessica shrugged as she looked around the familiar room. "You going somewhere?" she asked, noticing the battered suitcase sitting on the bench at the end of the bed.

"No," Natalie said.

"If you are, we have nicer luggage than that," Jessica said. "Where did you even find this thing? It looks like it's about to fall apart."

"Viki brought it down a few weeks ago," Natalie said. "It's mine."

"Okay," Jessica said, eyeing the suitcase skeptically. "Doesn't really look like your style."

"It's mine from before," Natalie said. "You know, before I came here. I guess it's been up in the attic. She thought there might be something in it that could help me."

"Was there?"

"I don't know," Natalie admitted. "I haven't looked inside."

"Why not?"

"It's a long story," Natalie said. "I just…I don't know, there was a time when everything I owned fit inside that suitcase. In my mind, that's still where I am. I threw some clothes and a couple pictures in here the night I left home. I didn't even fill up the suitcase, not even close. I just got out of there as quickly as I could."

"How much more do remember after leaving Roxy's?" Jessica asked.

"Not much," Natalie admitted. "About two or three months, maybe."

"So you're still fifteen," Jessica said. "Why did you tell us you were sixteen when you woke up in the hospital?"

Natalie shrugged. "It's the age people stop asking questions," she said, earning a confused look from Jessica. "When you're on your own, people ask questions if you're too young. Sixteen's when they stop. I figured that out a long time ago. I've been telling people I'm sixteen since I was like twelve, and especially once I…well, never mind."

Jessica almost questioned her sudden stop, but stopped herself, not wanting to push too hard too soon. "So where did you go?" she asked, taking a seat on the edge of Natalie's bed. "Once you left Roxy's, where did you go?"

Natalie sighed. "Nowhere in particular," she said, taking a seat next to Jessica. "Mostly just a string of shelters where people wouldn't ask too many questions or try to track down my family. Not that there was much to track down, I doubt Roxy would have even acknowledged being my mother at that point."

"Do you want to talk about it?" Jessica asked. "That night?"

Natalie hesitated but eventually shook her head. "Not really," she said.

"Okay," Jessica nodded, letting a slightly uncomfortable silence settle over them.

"You're not going ask?"

Jessica shook her head. "I know you had it rough growing up with Roxy for a mother," she said. "I can think of a thousand reasons you might have wanted to leave, or she might have told you to leave. You really got the worse end of that swap."

"What swap?"

"Right, I keep forgetting we've got all this history that you don't know anything about," Jessica said, pausing for a moment as she considered how much to tell Natalie. "Well, it's a long story, but when we were born, Mom didn't know she'd had twins, and so she took you home, and the OB who delivered us, Dr. Balsam, took me home to Roxy in Atlantic City."

"You went to Atlantic City? So how did I end up there?"

"Like I said, it's a really long story, and it'll be a lot easier if you could just remember it all eventually, because it sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud," Jessica said. "But yeah, you came here with Mom and Dad for a few months, and then you were kidnapped, and the woman who took you switched us. I promise, I will explain it all one of these days, but it is way more than you want to deal with tonight, trust me. My point is, ever since you first showed up here, I knew I got lucky. I had some pretty awful things happen to me growing up, but I always had Mom and Dad for support. I don't know that I would have had the strength to deal with growing up with Roxy, being on my own like you were."

"I don't know, I could handle Roxy most of the time," Natalie said. "She wasn't exactly motherly, and we almost never had food in the house unless I bought it, which usually meant stealing money out of her wallet when she was passed out on the couch after a night at the casino. And yeah, sometimes she'd be in a mood and she'd yell or tell me her crummy life was all my fault. I could ignore it most of the time, and when I couldn't, I'd lock myself in my room and wait for it to blow over. Most of the time she just left me to fend for myself, which suited me just fine. We had a status quo for a while there."

"What changed?"

"She got a boyfriend," Natalie said.

"I take it he wasn't a nice guy," Jessica guessed.

Natalie shook her head. "The problem with Evan wasn't that he wasn't nice," she said. "It was that he was too nice."

"I'm not sure I follow."

"He was too good to be true," Natalie said. "He had a job, he had a house, he had money, he had all his hair…he had everything Mom's boyfriends usually didn't. She was falling all over him from the minute he first hit on her at the pool hall, but something was off. Guys like that don't date the sloppy drunk beach blonde at the slot machines, at least not without an ulterior motive."

"Oh?" Jessica tried to hide the curiosity in her response, not wanting to frighten Natalie out of talking.

"He gave me creepy vibes from the start," Natalie said. "At first I thought maybe he was married and he was using her as his side chick, but that wasn't it. I tried to ignore it, because who cares what I think, right? He's nice enough, he treats her okay, and he even paid for things for me. Don't question a good thing, or something like that. They'd been together about three months when I figured it out. I, uh, I think it was an accident the first time, he didn't know I was home alone, but he sure knew what he wanted when he realized it."

Jessica sighed knowingly and reached out, silently squeezing Natalie's hand.

"After that night, I tried to be anywhere else when I knew he was coming over, but I didn't have that many places to go," Natalie continued, surprising even herself with how much she was confiding in Jessica. "I'd say no, I'd fight back. Sometimes it worked, most of the time it didn't. I don't know, maybe if I hadn't taken the clothes he bought me or laughed at his stupid jokes…maybe I led him on, maybe I…if I weren't such a bad person…"

"Natalie," Jessica interrupted, a seriousness in her voice as she looked at the oddly frightened, tearful version of her sister sitting next to her. "You were still a child. It was not your fault. You know that, right? I mean, you were what? Fifteen?"

"Fourteen," Natalie said quietly,. "When it started, I had just turned fourteen."

"He knew what he was doing," Jessica said. "Guys like that always know what they're doing. This was not your fault, and you are not a bad person."

"Maybe not for that," Natalie said. "But that's not everything."

"You can tell me," Jessica said, trying to encourage Natalie. "You're safe here, I promise. All of this was sixteen, maybe seventeen years ago. You're okay now."

"Don't you get it?" Natalie asked, turning her head back to face Jessica. "It wasn't sixteen years ago for me. For me, it hasn't even been three months since I last saw either of them. I don't even how this story ended, and I'm terrified to find out."

"What happened?" Jessica asked.

"I'm not stupid, no matter what Roxy says," Natalie said. "I'm young…or I was, I guess, but I'm not stupid. I was due to get my period on my fifteenth birthday, and I didn't. I knew what that meant."

"Oh Natalie," Jessica sighed knowingly.

"I tried to get rid of it," Natalie continued, her voice almost emotionless at this point. "This lady at the pool hall, she told me about some stuff I could drink that would make it go away. I drank double what she said, and just curled up in bed and waited for the bleeding. Every cramp, every spot of blood…I was hopeful, relieved even. But it was never more than bad cramps and a little spotting. I kept waiting every month, expecting my cycle to come back, but it didn't."

"Natalie…"

"I kind of hoped maybe I'd just damaged myself," Natalie said. "That it had worked, but it had done something bad to me. I figured that would be okay, I deserved it for what I did. But I kept feeling sick, so eventually I skipped school and went to a free clinic, and they…they ran some blood tests. They did some measurements, said I was probably about four or five months. I didn't believe them until they used this little wand thing and I heard the heartbeat. I was supposed to go back the next day for an ultrasound to make sure everything was okay and figure out exactly how far along I was."

"Did you tell Roxy?"

Natalie nodded. "I figured I only had two choices," she said. "Run away and try to give the baby up for adoption, or tell the truth and hope for once in my life, my mother would side with me. When I went home that afternoon, I decided to tell her. Obviously, I made the wrong choice."

"What happened that night, Natalie?" Jessica asked gently.

"She came home drunk," Natalie said. "I didn't realize how drunk until it was too late. I told her I was pregnant, and she…well, she went crazy. I'd never seen her that mad, at least until later that night."

"Did you tell her who the father was?"

Natalie shook her head. "She tried to get it out of me, but with how mad she got about the baby, I knew I couldn't tell her," she said. "But she figured it out."

"How?"

"She called and told him," Natalie said. "And he showed up later that night…if I thought Roxy was mad, he was a thousand times worse. He lost control, and she figured out why. I thought he was going to kill me."

Jessica sighed, wrapping her arm around Natalie's shoulders as she started to cry.

"I thought he was going to kill us," Natalie repeated. "I thought he was going to kill us both."

"He didn't," Jessica pointed out, pulling Natalie into a full hug as the sobs took over her body. "You're safe, Natalie, you got out. You're safe."

After a few minutes of letting her sister hold her tight while she cried, Natalie pulled back, wiping her face in embarrassment.

"Sorry," she muttered. "I, uh, I don't think I'm ready to talk about that night."

"That's okay," Jessica said. "Can I ask one question, though?"

Natalie nodded.

"What happened to the baby?"

Natalie hesitated, as thought trying to decide just how much she wanted to confide.

"It died," she said, so quietly Jessica almost didn't hear her. "I think my baby's dead."