# Chapter 17: The Shadow That Followed Isabel
Hello everyone, it's me again! How are you all doing? Today I will continue to walk with you and review Chapter 17 of "Forget You Saw Her free digital audiobook". This is a heavy one. It is raw, painful, and deeply human—a chapter about shame, silence, survival, and the terrible price of being disbelieved. So take a breath, settle in, and let's walk through Isabel's story together.
After that awful interview with Brother Beaumont, Isabel was forbidden from taking the sacrament for a month. The bread and water were withheld because she was not "worthy." And everyone knew. Not because anyone had to announce it—Isabel's new classmates in Laurels, her Young Women's leaders, her own sisters, they all understood. She wasn't dating Archer anymore, and she wasn't taking the sacrament. There were only so many reasons for that. When her parents finally explained what statutory rape was that night, Isabel swore up and down that she and Archer had never gone that far. Archer told his parents the same thing. Brother Beaumont had lied. But nobody believed them. They believed Brother Beaumont, the man who sat on the pulpit beside the bishop on Sundays, looking down at Isabel with his shark-black gaze while he took the sacrament. She refused to look back at him, except during prayers, when everyone's eyes were supposed to stay closed. Then she lifted her chin and imagined her eyes were lasers, cutting through his sunburned turkey neck until his liver-spotted head fell onto his shoulders. It was the only time she felt any relief from the pain in her chest.
Her heart was broken. And instead of healing, it festered.
Over the next three years, things only got worse. When Isabel wasn't angry, she felt numb. And when she didn't feel angry or numb, she felt desperately and completely alone. Isabel the harlot. Nobody said it to her face anymore, not teasing. Now they whispered it behind her back. Everything that had once felt safe and comforting and real felt wrong. Church, her friends in Laurels, even her sisters. The way they looked at her, talked to her, even walked past her in the hall—all of it changed after that night with Brother Beaumont. Her grades fell from A's and B's to D's and F's. The deadline to apply to BYU came and went. She spent more and more time alone in her room, headphones on, listening to music nobody else could hear, blasting it so loud that her ears rang in the silence afterward. When she turned nineteen and graduated from high school, she refused to go to church anymore.
By then, Brother Beaumont was long gone. There was a new bishop and new counselors, and the Beaumonts had moved to a different neighborhood. But Isabel still saw his shadow everywhere she went. Her refusal to attend church was the final straw for her parents. "If you're going to live under our roof, you'll make righteous choices, Isabel," her dad said, standing at the foot of her bed and looking to her mom for confirmation. Her mom nodded, resolved. Isabel stared at them both dully, refusing to show the panic rising inside her. She didn't have a job. She didn't have friends. She didn't have anywhere else to live.
When her dad left the room, her mom sat beside her and gently removed the headphones Isabel had shoved back over her ears. To Isabel's surprise, there were tears in her mom's eyes. "Izzy, I've been praying for you every night for the past three years. I don't know how to help you anymore. But God does, and I'm just going to have to trust Him. Because ... well, even if Brother Beaumont did what you said ..." She trailed off and shook her head, as if the thought was too much to consider. Then she continued. "Even if that really happened, you need to forgive him. This bitterness and anger is coming from Satan, not Heavenly Father. Let it go, Isabel. Come back to us."
It was only years of practice that kept the tears from welling up in Isabel's eyes. She looked at the wall and refused to say anything else until her mom finally shook her head and went back downstairs with her dad.
Isabel moved out a few weeks later. She answered a Craigslist ad from a woman promising a one-bedroom apartment in exchange for daily house cleaning. But it wasn't a woman who met her in the Walmart parking lot and drove her to the rundown eight-plex near the cemetery. It was a man in a beat-up Dodge Charger who barely looked at her as he tossed her duffel into the trunk. And it wasn't house cleaning. The apartment was nothing like the pictures—filthy carpet, a couch that smelled like mildew, a mattress on the floor with no sheets, and a door that didn't lock all the way. The two "managers" who greeted her said the cleaning gig had "fallen through." But she could still stay. They offered her cash to be "friendly" to a man who would be coming by later that night. Just one, they said. Just once.
Isabel stammered out a terrified "okay." She didn't know what else to do. And unlike that day with Brother Beaumont, she couldn't think of anywhere to run. So she made herself as numb as she could and got through it. To her surprise, it wasn't as bad as she expected. And she earned a little money, too. But it wasn't just once, of course. And that's how, for the next two years, Isabel became a harlot for real. *Isabel the harlot, Isabel the harlot*, she sometimes chanted in her head while she did what she had to do. It was something else to focus on besides the endless array of men whose eyes reminded her of Dennis Beaumont. She cut her long blonde hair short and dyed it pale blue—anything to distance herself from the person she'd been before. She tried sips of cheap red wine the other girls offered and discovered it packed the cavity in her chest with just enough gauze that she fell asleep without dreaming of anything that made her cry. She considered trying the "goodfellas" a couple of the girls offered in exchange for tips—tiny white pills that guaranteed a peaceful night's sleep—but stopped short because she was scared that if she let herself feel that good, she'd only want more.
Then one Friday night in the middle of winter, everything got worse. It started with a knock on the door.
Most of the time, the knock that told her a client was waiting—sent by one of the managers—was three short raps. This time, it was two short raps, then two raps with long pauses in between. Isabel opened up anyway. Any time before 10:00 p.m., they had to open to clients. That was the rule. And there he was. It was like he'd stepped right out of her nightmares and into the corridor of her rundown one-bedroom apartment with the door that didn't always lock properly. Same bald, liver-spotted head and greasy combover. Same scraggly beard. Same half-smile. Only this time, he wasn't wearing a suit. He was wearing faded brown coveralls and work boots caked in snow and mud, like he'd just come from a job site.
Brother Beaumont.
He looked as surprised to see her as she did to see him. "Isabel Palphreyman," he said in wonder, his breath puffing white in the freezing air. He took in her blue hair, letting his eyes travel from her eyes down her body. "I always wondered what happened to you." He took a step forward.
Isabel tried to shut the door in his face. She could deal with being a harlot for everybody else. But not for him. Never for him.
"No," she called out, "somebody help me!" She leaned into the door with all her might, hoping her voice would echo through the stairwell, that one of the other girls would come out, that one of the Johns would come out of the "office" downstairs and investigate. But everybody—including Isabel—was used to the occasional scuffle. The odd scream. The raised voices. Some clients liked it rough. The other girls knew better than to interfere. Besides, most of them were either asleep or out of their heads when they weren't servicing. It was a cold night. The only thing you'd get from sticking your nose into someone else's business was goosebumps and a cussing out.
He leaned his shoulder, then his hip, hard into the flimsy door so she couldn't slam it shut, grabbing for her bare arm. His touch burned like acid. Just like she remembered. Isabel gave up trying to blockade the door and ran through the apartment, away from him, even though she knew there was nowhere to go.
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## Reader's Impressions & Star Rating
Reading this chapter felt like watching a wound reopen in slow motion. Isabel's pain is so vividly drawn that it becomes almost physical—the shunning, the whispered cruelty, the way her family's love comes wrapped in conditions and disbelief. The most devastating part is how the very system that should have protected her becomes another weapon. Brother Beaumont's reappearance at the end is a nightmare made real, and the cliffhanger left my heart pounding. This is dark, difficult storytelling, but it never feels exploitative. It feels honest. It feels like a girl trying to survive when everyone has decided she is the one who should be ashamed.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 4.9 / 5 Stars
## Next Chapter Prediction
Based on that terrifying final moment, I predict the next chapter will be a confrontation with no easy escape. Isabel has run deeper into an apartment that has no safe exit, and Brother Beaumont is forcing his way in. But I also think this is a breaking point. Maybe Isabel fights back in a way she couldn't before. Maybe one of the other girls or a client finally intervenes. Or maybe she escapes into the snow with nothing but her survival instinct. The title *Forget You Saw Her* keeps echoing—being unseen, being dismissed, being erased. I believe this is the chapter where Isabel refuses to be invisible any longer, even if it costs her everything.
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