Epilogue
A week later, in an elegant restaurant, Jeffrey MacDonald bought them champagne and handed her a black velvet box with a diamond ring in it.
She fought back the tears as they left the restaurant.
Sitting on the couch at her house, he leaned over and kissed her, still waiting for her answer to his proposal. But Ellie pushed him away suddenly. He was so good, so clean and she was nothing now but a defiled woman. Jeffrey had a right to know the truth.
And so, still fighting back burning tears of shame, she told him as best she could the awful things that had happened to her at the hands of her captors.
"And you think," he said, "that because you were raped by those criminals, that I won't want to marry you . . . ? "
She wanted to cry out . . . Jeffrey, you don't understand . . . I loved it. . . I'm as depraved, as evil, as they are! But she gazed up at his loving, trusting face, and knew she could never tell him the truth.
"I love you, Ellie," he said. "I love you no matter what they did to you."
She smiled and he dabbed her tears with his handkerchief.
"Yes, Jeffrey," she said. "I love you and I want to marry you."
And she knew now that the burden of her guilty secret would be hers alone to bear. She prayed that its heavy weight might lighten with the years.