I saw her walking barefoot in the snow, her party dress soaked, her eyes glazed over. I rolled down the window and yelled that I wanted to help her. She stopped, hesitated… and looked behind her as if something were chasing her. In that instant, I understood that she wasn’t running from the cold, but from a night that had gone wrong. When she got into the car, she didn’t thank me. She said something that made me grip the steering wheel in terror.
I saw her walking barefoot in the snow, her soaked party dress clinging to her body, her makeup smeared as if she’d been crying for hours. It was almost three in the morning on a secondary road near Burgos , and there was nothing around but dark trees and flickering streetlights. I slowed down without thinking. Nobody walks like that at that hour if everything is alright.
I rolled down the window and yelled that I wanted to help her. My voice sounded clumsy, even to me. She stopped abruptly. For a second I thought she was going to run, but she didn’t. She hesitated. Then she looked behind her, into the darkness, as if she expected to see something emerge from the trees.
That’s when I understood: I wasn’t running away from the cold. I was running away from a night that had gone wrong.
I opened the passenger door. It took her almost a minute to approach. Her feet were purple. She was trembling, but she wasn’t crying. When she got in the car, she closed the door carefully, as if afraid of making a noise. I started the engine and turned the heater up to the maximum.
He turned his head towards me and said, with a calmness that did not match his appearance:
—If we stop anywhere, they’ll find me.
I felt my fingers tighten on the steering wheel.
“Who?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. He kept looking in the rearview mirror. I offered him my coat. He accepted it without looking at me.
“My name is Emily ,” she said after a while. “And I shouldn’t be alive right now.”
It wasn’t a dramatic statement. It was a statement of fact.
I asked him if he wanted to go to the police. He shook his head too quickly.
—Not yet. First I need to get out of this province
Something about the way she spoke made me obey without question. I drove toward the highway. Every time I saw lights in the distance, she shrank back.
After ten minutes, he murmured the phrase that chilled me more than snow:
—The man who left me there… knows my full name. And he knows where my daughter lives.
I gripped the steering wheel in terror, aware that by picking her up I hadn’t just let a stranger into my car. I had entered into a situation from which I might not emerge unscathed.
Emily didn’t speak for almost half an hour. She only gave me directions, always avoiding large towns. I drove without asking questions, but with every kilometer, the feeling of committing an irreversible act of recklessness grew stronger.
When he finally spoke, he did so looking at the windshield.
“It wasn’t a party,” he said. “It was a company dinner in Valladolid . An expensive hotel. Everything was fine. Everything was normal.”
She told me she worked in administration for a logistics company. Divorced. An eight-year-old daughter. That night, her boss insisted on accompanying her to her room to “talk about her contract.” She didn’t scream. There were no visible injuries. But when she tried to leave, he took her cell phone and told her no one would believe her.
“She told me she knew my ex-husband,” she added. “That she knew where my daughter studied. That there was no need to use force when you have information.”
She managed to get out when another colleague knocked on the door. She went down to the parking garage without her coat, purse, or shoes. He followed her. He put her in his car. He drove out of town and left her there on the side of the road as a warning.
—So that he would understand that he could make me disappear whenever he wanted.
I felt nauseous. I asked her why she wasn’t reporting it.
—Because someone else did it before —he replied—. And they transferred her “for her own good.”
We stopped at an open gas station. I bought her dry clothes and something warm. She was shivering less, but she was still on edge. She asked me to take her to Logroño , where an old friend lived.
During the journey, I thought about my own daughter, about how easy it is to believe that these things happen to “others.” How comfortable it is to look the other way.
I dropped her off in front of an apartment building. Before getting out, she looked at me directly for the first time.
“I don’t know why you helped me,” he said.
“Because nobody should walk barefoot in the snow,” I replied.
I didn’t sleep that night. The next day I called a lawyer friend. Then I called a victims’ support group. I couldn’t erase what had happened, but I also couldn’t pretend I didn’t know.
A week later, Emily called me. She had filed a report. Not at first, but after ensuring her daughter’s safety at her mother’s house and gathering evidence that others had kept silent about. She wasn’t alone.
He asked me to testify as a witness. I agreed without hesitation, even though I knew what it entailed. His boss denied everything. He said she was drunk, that she got out of the car voluntarily. A polished, rehearsed statement.
But he hadn’t counted on the gas station’s security cameras or other witnesses.
The process was slow. Painful. There were times when Emily wanted to give up. I accompanied her at times, without intruding. Not as a savior, but as someone who decided not to look away.
Months later, the case came to light. Not as a media scandal, but as a precedent. Other women spoke out.
One autumn afternoon, I saw her again. She was dressed normally. Sturdy shoes. She smiled wearily.
“I’m still afraid,” she confessed. “But I’m not alone anymore.”
We said goodbye without promises. Without forced romance. With respect.
Sometimes I think about that night and how easy it would have been not to stop the car. To keep going. To not complicate my life.
But I also know something else: there are decisions that don’t make you a hero, but they do prevent you from being an accomplice.
And that, in this world, is already a lot.