# Chapter 19: The Underpass at the Edge of Everything
Hello everyone, it's me again! How are you all doing? Today I will continue to walk with you and review Chapter 19 of "Forget You Saw Her free digital audiobook". This is not an easy chapter. It is cold, raw, and merciless, and it follows Isabel through a night that will leave scars far deeper than the ones on her skin. So take a breath, settle in, and let’s step into the dark together.
Dennis Beaumont was faster than he looked. And what happened that day in Isabel’s apartment was worse than she could have imagined. He pushed her down onto the carpet, his breath wheezing, his words crawling over her like oil. “Little tease,” he called her, as if she had ever been the one with power. As if she had invited any of it. He dragged up the past, throwing old accusations at her like stones, and Isabel did the only thing she could do. She went deadweight. She stopped fighting. She stopped running. She disappeared inside herself until it was over.
When he finally stood, she stayed on the ground, so still and silent that he prodded her with his foot. He accused her of playing possum. He talked about getting his money’s worth. Her stomach lurched, but she kept her eyes shut, praying he would walk out the door and leave her there. Then she heard a sound that froze her blood. A shutter-click. Her eyes flew open. Dennis stood above her, phone in hand, taking a photo of her half-naked body. He threatened to send an anonymous tip to her parents, to let them wonder what their daughter had become. Isabel begged him not to. And he smiled, hollow-eyed, and told her that next time she had better be a little friendlier.
That was the moment the apartment stopped being a place she could survive. That night, she packed her few things with shaking hands and slipped into the frostbitten December air. She didn’t tell the so-called apartment managers she was leaving, even though she knew they would be furious. She didn’t even collect the money they owed her for her last clients. She didn’t have a plan. She didn’t have anywhere to go. All she cared about was making sure Dennis Beaumont could never find her or touch her again.
The only person she said goodbye to was Rita, a girl who stepped into the breezeway just as Isabel was tiptoeing down the stairs. Rita noticed the blue backpack with IZZY stitched across the front pocket—a nickname Isabel had tried on for a brief moment when she was twelve. Inside were clothes and around two hundred dollars in cash, everything she had managed to save over two years. Rita asked where she was headed. Her voice was kind, not prying. Isabel mumbled that she just couldn’t stay there anymore. When Rita caught sight of her swollen, bitten face, she offered her a place to talk, a moment of shelter. But Isabel knew she wasn’t safe there. She had never been safe there. Every cell in her body finally understood that.
Rita didn’t push. Instead, she pulled a baggie from her hoodie pocket and pressed it into Isabel’s hand—little white pills she called “goodfellas.” “Get a good night’s sleep at least, hon,” she said. Isabel hesitated, then took them. She asked Rita not to tell the managers. Rita promised she hadn’t seen a thing. And Isabel walked into the night, already crying again.
She walked fast through eerily silent streets, past the pitch-black cemetery, until she reached the underpass connected to I-84. It wasn’t far from the eight-plex—maybe a mile and a half—but it was far enough. It was the only place she could reach on foot that offered any kind of shelter. She thought about finding a payphone, but what was the point? Calling the police was out of the question. If she admitted what she had been doing when Dennis found her, they would arrest her and everyone else for prostitution. Out of the frying pan and into the fire, as her dad would have said.
She thought about calling her parents. Did they miss her? Did her sisters still love her? Had they shut her out of their memories? Would they tell her to come home to a warm bed and dinner, or would there be a long, guarded silence? Would they finally believe her about Dennis Beaumont if she told them what had just happened? Or would they be so disgusted by what she had become that they would hang up? Isabel looked down at her dirty, shapeless clothes, felt the meager money in her backpack, touched her bruised face and choppy, five-dollar-box-dyed blue hair. Her parents hadn’t believed her when she was wearing her Sunday best, with a prayer in her heart and her long blonde hair tied back in a bow. They absolutely wouldn’t believe her now.
The underpass rose before her, silhouetted against a starless sky. The highway hummed above, cars heading north or south, but the narrow road beneath was quiet. Flickering lights traced the concrete walls. Small fires burned beside drooping tarps. Figures slowly took shape—shopping carts, garbage bags, sleeping bags. The smell of wet pavement, cigarette smoke, and human waste filled the air. Isabel’s body shook harder as she moved closer, but nobody looked her way. Nobody sprang from the shadows. Nobody paid her much attention at all. A woman with gray hair like a frizzy halo waved at her tentatively. Isabel waved back and set her backpack down in an open patch of dirt and weeds a short distance away. She didn’t feel safe exactly. But she felt safer than she had an hour ago. And that was something.
She curled into a ball in the dirt, trying to let sleep pull her under. But the memory of Dennis Beaumont standing over her, phone raised, shutter clicking, was waiting behind her eyelids. A heavy truck rumbled overhead, and the cement wall behind her trembled. She stifled a sob by clamping her jaw shut, sending pain throbbing through her lip and cheek again. She had never felt so broken, so dirty, so used-up. The feeling grew huge and unbearable, pressing down on her chest until it seemed the night itself was trying to swallow her whole. Like the underpass was its jawbone. She was alone. She was hurt. She was ruined. She was worthless. She wasn’t even a harlot anymore. Just a piece of trash.
Her hand moved to her coat pocket. She took out the baggie of little white pills. Then she popped one into her mouth and closed her eyes, begging for the sleep Rita had promised.
As a reader, this chapter absolutely gutted me. It is not just a sequence of traumatic events; it is a study in survival, shame, and the tiny mercies that keep a person breathing. Rita’s quiet kindness, the old woman’s wave, the terrible shelter of the underpass—all of it matters because Isabel has so little left. The writing makes her isolation feel physical, and the final pill becomes both a cry for rest and a frightening cliffhanger. This is a hard chapter, but it is unforgettable.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 4.8 / 5 Stars
Next Chapter Prediction: Isabel will wake in the underpass, disoriented and exposed, and she will likely meet someone who becomes a fragile ally—perhaps the gray-haired woman or another person living on the margins. Dennis Beaumont’s photo threat will hang over her like a blade, and I suspect she will either try to disappear into a new identity or make a desperate attempt to contact someone from her past. The next chapter will probably show the first small, dangerous step toward survival, and maybe the first hint that Isabel is not as alone as she believes.
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