Page 36 of Untamed Hunter Daddy

Then the door closes and for the first time in days I’m in a room without him.

Dr. Engel has kind eyes and a quiet voice. The room is beige. Table, two chairs, tissue box, water pitcher, legal pad. No windows.

“You can start wherever you want, Zoe. There’s no wrong place.”

There is, though. The wrong place is the center—the part where the story stops being about Tyler and starts being about me.

I start with the diner because I’ve already told that part. Third stool. Forty percent tips. Late afternoons. The Wednesday he walked out when another waitress was working. She writes everything down.

“Tell me about the first time you went to his cabin,” she says.

“He said he had a business opportunity. Partners looking for someone to help with a new venture. Outdoor recreation, guided tours. He said he’d told them about me and they wanted to meet. He said it was a chance to get out of the diner.”

I stop. The armor is thinner than I thought.

“I should’ve known,” I say, and the crack opens. “I should’ve seen it. The late afternoons. The schedule. The way he always came when nobody else was around. I’m a person who notices things. That’s what I do. I notice everything, and I didn’t notice that the man sitting three feet from my face was taking my life apart one Tuesday at a time.”

The tears come sharp and humiliating.

Dr. Engel pushes the tissues toward me and waits. She doesn’t say it wasn’t my fault. She just waits.

“The self-blame is normal,” she says eventually. “It’s one of the most common responses and one of the most persistent. You’ll have days where you understand a trained predator targeted you with methods designed to bypass exactly the awareness you’re describing. And you’ll have days where the understanding collapses and the blame rushes back in. Both are true at the same time. The goal isn’t to eliminate the blame. It’s to build a structure strong enough to hold both truths without one destroying the other.”

I wipe my face. “There’s something else,” I say. “Something I haven’t told anyone. Not even Ryker.”

Her pen stops.

“When Tyler first brought me to the cabin with the lock, I didn’t try to leave. Not the first night. He said the lock was for safety, that there were bears, that the area was remote. I believed him. Or I told myself I did because believing was easier than facing the alternative. By the second night I knew the bears were a lie. A deadbolt doesn’t keep animals out. It keeps people in. I knew and I stayed. Three more days before the other women arrived and the pretending became impossible.”

“Why did you stay?”

The question is gentle. She already knows. She needs me to say it.

“Because being in that cabin with a man who’d locked the door was still less alone than being in my apartment with the door unlocked. Because my parents were dead and my emergency contact list was empty and the last person who’d remembered my birthday was a regular at the diner. Because Tyler was the first person in a year who’d acted like my existence was an event instead of an inconvenience. Even after the lock and the lie, some broken part of me would rather be trapped by someone who noticed me than free and invisible.”

The room is very quiet. Dr. Engel looks at me the way Ryker looks at me. Like what I just said is a fact about the world and not a judgment on the person in it.

“Thank you for telling me that,” she says. “That took courage.”

“It took a lot of days and a man who taught me that telling the truth doesn’t have to cost you everything.”

The debrief lasts three hours. I tell her everything. The cabin. The locked doors. The other women. The mine. The night of the raid. The running. The mountains. The berries. The rock hollow and the eight days that should have killed me.

I don’t tell her about Ryker. The personal parts. She doesn’t ask.

When it’s over I walk out into the hallway and he’s there. Sitting in a plastic chair against the wall, forearms on his knees, the same posture he held beside the bed the first night. He looks up when he hears my footsteps.

He stands and opens his arms. No negotiation. Just an offering.

I walk into it.

He holds me in a federal hallway while agents walk past and phones ring. He doesn’t say it’s okay. He doesn’t say I’m brave. He just holds.

“I told her something I haven’t told you,” I say into his chest.

“You don’t have to tell me.”

“I know. But I will. Later. When we’re somewhere that isn’t a hallway.”