And soon we were sitting around my table with mugs of tea steaming between us. Rain had started up again outside, tapping softly against the windows.
“How did you find me?” I asked.
She wanted to be able to thank you properly. We have some connections in local law enforcement. It wasn’t difficult to track you down.”
I felt a flicker of unease but pushed it down.
“That seems like a lot of effort just to say thank you.”
“You don’t understand what you did for us,” Kristy’s mother said, her voice thick with emotion.
“You didn’t just help them… you brought our daughter back to us.”
“I just gave them a ride.”
“No.” The father’s voice was firm. “You did so much more than that.”
And then they told me everything.
His name was Rick. It wasn’t about money or ambition — it was about the way he treated her from the start. He’d make plans and show up hours late without apology.
He’d ask for money for “investments,” then blow it on something frivolous. He’d yell, belittle, and insult his wife. But Kristy stayed, convinced she could fix him.
“He’d tell her she was lucky he ‘put up with her,’ that no one else ever would.
And after a while… she believed it,” Kristy’s father added.
“Rick was charming at first… that’s how he hooked her,” her mother said bitterly. “But deep down, he was controlling and manipulative. We saw it early on.
She didn’t.”
When they tried to intervene, and even cut off financial support to discourage him, Kristy got pregnant. And that sealed everything.
No phone. No wallet. Nothing.
“She went to her friend’s house first,” the father continued.
“Didn’t want to scare us. The silly girl thought she’d be a burden to us. How could she even think like that when she and her daughter are our everything?
Thank goodness, her friend convinced her to call us. That’s when we learned what her husband had done. And about you, dear.”Continue reading…
