Devon Halliday
There was an incident that she can't now remember, and anyway she'd prefer not to talk about it. It will be important, crucially, will prove responsible for the entirety of who she is and what she becomes. But you don't have to worry about that yet, and besides, like I said, she'd rather not discuss it.
For now she is uniquely concerned with the particulars of her ordinary life, which has lately been thrown into turmoil. She has received a letter, a text, an email, a package, or a phone call. It perturbs her, though when she narrates its contents to her most trusted friends, they explain it away with very ordinary and unhelpful hypotheticals. A wrong number, or a wrong address, or a prank, a joke, an ex, a typo. In the face of her mild, spunky, down-to-earth friends, her intuition quiets. They are wrong, though, and she is right. How can they help, poor things? They don't know about the incident.
Unease prickles. The house isn't safe. She is striding, pacing, jogging, and crossing intersections. She is doing some serious thinking in transit. There are a lot of windows out there, so many symbolic lit-up tableaux that she almost misses the flash, in the top left corner, like a reflection of— But it's gone now, she turns around, the street is bare. She has this sinking, creeping, oozing feeling that the past will come back to haunt her. What she doesn't realize (we can forgive her for not realizing) is that the past has never left, has been here all this time, coiled like a jack-in-the-box with its time-biding smirk: ha-ha! How much easier this would be if she could recall the incident! It lingers, fuzzy and darkish, in the margins of her psyche. There have now been several frightening protrusions into her formerly ordinary life, beyond the initial package, letter, or phone call. A strange car is parked near her house, or has driven past it. Someone has failed to call her back who usually picks up right away. The handsome man she met last week turns up at her favorite coffee shop, asking friendly well-meant questions, one after the other, too many.
She doesn't know whom to trust. Are her unhelpful friends perhaps suspiciously unhelpful? An inmate has escaped from a local prison, asylum, or experimental laboratory, says the innocuous hum of some half-heard radio. Are the men she keeps meeting too handsome? What she would give for the shallow dilemma that started this whole cascade! Very soon there will be a crisis, of face-dirtying proportions at the least. Blood may be involved. It is crucial now that she remember the incident—keep in mind I did warn you about this—but there's a sort of hole at the center of it through which the pivotal details slip. There was definitely a man, but which man? The kitchen sink glinting in the memory's background is perfectly clear. She's quite close, actually, to an entire remembrance, a full narration of the event to a trusted-again friend or love interest, or just to you.
But it's too late—the jack-in-the-box springs—the past is right behind her, it's here! It's knocking her on the head with a blunt household item. All fades to black, all except the incident, which now plays out in stark, staccato clarity, answering almost all of your questions.
The reasons for which she might not have wanted to talk about the incident before this point are now clear. The incident is, frankly, a bit trite and predictable; not to minimize what she went through that long-ago day, except she's hardly the first to go through such a thing, and it all hinges on a scar she never mentioned having. Not that you require a full and preemptive accounting of scars, but this one could easily have been brushed against, alluded to, indecently exposed, at least once. Anyway, so the nefarious past is here on the scene, no longer suited up in the costume of the present, and he's got a lot to say in his build-up to inflicting upon the woman some precise and stoical pain, which seems almost surely inescapable—
but you oughtn't to have worried because the incident's chief instigator is, turns out, doomed: the woman has earned (through her suffering, now at last comprehensively catalogued) a bolder and brighter future, and she's going to overcome both the incident and this asshole and burst forth into her best life, with her entirely vindicated love interest and her spunky reliable friends, etc. etc., and luckily none of this takes too long, because you're beginning to lose interest in this woman now that the floor is scrubbed clean of any incidental blood and the jack is stuffed back in the box, sitting tight till next time, and the long-lost ex, half-sibling, inmate, whoever he is and despite all the trouble he went to breaking out of his asylum/prison/etc. and re-insinuating himself into her life, is back behind bars, and she can return to her high-powered but fulfilling job in media or architecture or whatever, and it's at this exact moment (the moment of losing interest) that the case zips closed and the story ends, perfectly calibrated and right on time.