I push up too fast, stumbling. My dress skirt snags against the chair, and I nearly fall before forcing myself forward. The candle burns behind me, flame leaping, reaching as though it wants to catch me, snare me, drag me back into the dark.
I don’t breathe again until the heavy door shuts between us.
My room is a dark pocket when I stumble back into it. Small and bleak, it feels like an afterthought—bare walls, a thin blanket folded on a narrow bed. The air tastes of old baked dust from the radiator and a mildew so faint it’s already seeping into the floorboards, like the chapel itself is forgetting how to breathe.
I slam the door so hard the wood shudders. My back presses into it, spine against cold grain. My chest tightens until it feels like my ribs are folding in on themselves. Breaths come jagged, shallow, too fast, too sharp, scraping my throat raw. My hands shake like they’re trying to escape my body. My legs threatento give way, trembling beneath me, useless, betraying me. He didn’t touch me—at least, not the way blades break skin—but the man was a cloud of filth. He hangs in my memory like smoke, stinging my face, staining my clothes, making the world smell wrong.
I lurch to the drawer, limbs moving on their own because I need something—anything—that isn’t the room, the voice, the threat. I need the graphite, the paper. Drawing is the only place that feels like mine, where my hands make something honest out of the noise.
But the drawer is empty.
“No.” The word rips out of me, thin and jagged. My fingers claw through the scattered dresses and modest scarves, overturning the small, plain things I have left. My sketches—my hiding places, the secret corners of me where I breathe—are gone. The blankness where they should be is a new kind of violence.
A door creek. The hinges complain like a witness.
He fills the doorway.
“How’s the prodigal artist?” Father’s voice is calm, almost fond. The words wash over me but land like stones. “What’s the matter, daughter? Lost your blasphemous acts of defiance?”
“Father, please.” My voice is smaller than I feel. “It’s just art.”
He steps all the way in, the lamplight catching his collarbone like a cross. His smile is slow and certain, practiced. “Art.” He repeats it as if testing the taste, as if the word itself needs to be broken. There’s a tremor at the edge of his voice that I used to believe was softness. Now it tastes like finality.
The cold in my chest doubles, a slow-rolling ice. His meaning arrives like a verdict. “You won’t need art where you’re going,” he says, smug, satisfied. “All you need is faith—faith in me, and in the Lord.”
The sentence hangs there, a rope with a noose at the end. Faith becomes a thing he hands down like a law, like a binding. Not a comfort. Not a choice. A prison.
I open my mouth. Nothing good lives in the sound that comes out—only a small, useless protest. My fingers, restless and useless, scrape at the hem of the scarf I still have. Ink and paper might be gone, but the memory of each line is still under my skin. It’s mine, even if they try to steal it.
My throat burns.
He steps closer, lowering his voice. “I’ve seen the man in your drawings. The one who skulked outside at night, sitting in your pew, searching for you.” He smirks. “He won’t be coming again. I’ve made sure of it.”
I freeze. His words strike like lightning.
Trey. He came back. Hewaslooking for me.
No one has ever cared before.
He watches me a beat longer, satisfied with whatever mark his words left. Then, he turns and leaves. The door closes slow, like a judge sealing a file.
The silence that follows is loud enough to hurt. I press my palms flat to the drawer’s empty wood, feeling the grain as if it will whisper back what was taken. The room smells of him—the faint tang of his cologne, candle wax, and something sour that makes my stomach twist. I sit on the edge of the bed and shake until the tremor is only a small hum.
They have taken my paper. They have not taken the lines I learned by heart at three in the morning, fingers stained and trembling. They have not taken the way I see the world—the flare of color in the gutter, the shadow of a hand on a hymnbook, the way light slices through a curtain and names everything in gold.
I curl my knees up, clutch the empty space where my sketches should be, and repeat the prayers I once mouthed with real conviction, twisting the words inside until they mean something different—until they are my armor and not his chain.
My chest feels like it might burst from the weight of a truth I don’t know how to carry… someone came back for me. Someone saw me. Someone cared enough to look.
Summer is long gone—yet he came back.
How long ago was it? Was he here yesterday? Last week? Under the same roof? My vision blurs, tears sliding down my face as the chains close tighter around my wrists.
Night falls.
My candle burns low, shadows crawling across the walls like hands reaching for me.
The wedding dress hangs in the corner, taunting me. White. Stiff. Pure cotton with a high collar that bites at the throat, sleeves strangling down to the wrists, the skirt heavy enough to drown in.
