I can feel each individual finger through the thin fabric of my blouse, the same way I did upstairs. My pulse kicks up another notch, and I’m suddenly keenly aware of how small this space is. How close we’re standing. How his thumb is doing that thing again where it paints endless circles against my skin.
“Bastian—”
“I know.” His voice is rough. “I know.”
But he doesn’t let go.
The flashlight beam wavers slightly. I realize his hand is shaking.
“Hey,” I say softly. “It’s okay. We’re going to be fine.” Buildings have safety protocols. Someone will notice the elevator is stuck. They’ll send maintenance. “We’ll be out of here in—” I check my watch, but it’s too dark to see the face. “—probably twenty minutes. Thirty, tops.”
“I’m not worried about help,” he says in a choked voice. “I’m worried about what I’ll do if I’m stuck in here with you for much longer.”
Oh. My. Lanta.I swallow hard, though my cheeks are approximately the temperature of the sun right now. “We can keep it PG.”
He nods. “We can do that.”
“We can, right? I mean, can we?” I ask. “Because I’m not gonna lie—I’m starting to freak out a little bit here. You’re not the only one who’s bad with enclosed spaces.”
“Yeah? What’s your excuse?”
I don’t answer right away. Can’t, really, because my throat has gone tight and my brain is doing that thing where it yanks me backward through time without asking permission first. Very rude.
I’m seven years old, crouched in the back of Mama’s closet, wedged between a broken vacuum cleaner and a stack of shoeboxes that reek of mothballs.
The latest Derek is shouting in the living room. He’s using a lot of grownup words and I don’t know what they mean, but the meaning doesn’t seem to matter as much as the volume.
His keeps going up.
Mama’s is going down and down and down.
“Get in the closet, baby,” Mama had whispered when the fighting first started over dinner. As she pushed me toward the bedroom, her hands were shaking so badly that the bracelets on her wrist were clacking like maracas. “Cover your ears and sing yourself a song, okay? A nice loud one. Don’t come out until I say.”
So I did as she said, because that’s what good daughters do. I sang every song I could think of—”Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” “The Itsy Bitsy Spider,” that Spice Girls song from the radio that I didn’t really know all the words to. I sang until my throat hurt, hands clamped over my ears, eyes squeezed shut against the darkness.
But I could still hear the crash of something breaking. Mama’s sharp gasp. Derek’s boots stomping across the floor.
And when I finally stopped singing and peeled my hands off my ears, I could hear the silence he left behind. In that silence, there was one sound. The smallest sob. My mother’s as she cried all to herself.
That was worse than all the noise put together.
Bastian’s thumb stops its circling. “Eliana?”
“I’m fine.” But no “I’m fine” has ever sounded less fine than that one. It’s strangled and wrong, and the walls are pressing in, and suddenly, the elevator isn’t just small, it’s tiny, shrinking by the second, and I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t fucking breathe?—
My chest constricts like someone’s wrapped it in plastic wrap and keeps pulling tighter, tighter,tighter. The darkness isn’t just dark anymore—it’salive, pressing against my eyeballs, filling my mouth, my nose, my lungs.
“Eliana.” Bastian sounds far away, like he’s calling from the other end of a tunnel. “Eliana, look at me.”
“Can’t—” I gasp. “Can’t see—too dark?—”
The flashlight beam swings up toward the ceiling as he sets it on the floor and drags me down to a seat. I can half-see now, and Bastian is asking me if that’s better?—
But it’s not better, because now, I can see how small this box is, how there’s nowhere to go, no escape, and the voices of all the Dereks who ever yelled at my mother are somehow bleeding through twenty years and a thousand miles to fill my ears with shouting and I hear Mama’s crying again andTwinkle, twinkle, little starand the sound of plates breaking against a wall?—
“I need—” My hands scrabble at my throat, at the high collar of my blouse that suddenly feels like a noose. “I need to get out?—”
“Hey, hey, no—” Bastian’s hands close over mine, stopping me from clawing at the fabric. “Don’t do that. You’re okay. We’re okay.”
