"I should have known sooner." She's not looking at me anymore. "I've been pacing around this cottage thinking everyone who tried to help me ended up dead."
"Now you know different."
"Now I know different." She almost smiles. "One good thing."
She looks at me then. Holds my gaze the way she did in the garden two nights ago, kneeling in the dirt with her hands full of weeds—trying to see past the gruff and the grunt work.
"You've lost people."
"Yeah."
"Is that why you're like this?" She tilts her head. "Keeping everything at arm's length."
Too close. Red and fire and things I don't talk about.
"We're not doing this."
"Doing what?"
"Trading trauma." I stand up and push back from the table. "I told you what you wanted to know—now we're done."
I cross to the living room. Put distance between us—not outside, can't go outside, but at least across the room.
She doesn't follow.
We don't speak for hours.
I pretend to work on the wiring behind the wall. She sits in the armchair with a book she's not reading, turning pages at random intervals.
Around six, I make myself a sandwich I don't taste. Make one for her too, leave it outside the bedroom door after she disappears inside without a word.
An hour later, it's still there.
I lie on the couch and count the cracks in the ceiling. Lose count. Start over. One long fracture runs corner to corner, splitting the room in half.
Around midnight, I hear her moving. The creak of the bedroom door. The soft pad of bare feet. The scrape of the plate against the floor as she picks it up.
At least she's eating.
I close my eyes. Try to sleep.
All I see is her face when I reached for her. The flinch. The same flinch she'd give one of the men who hurt her.
I'm not. I'm not one of them. But she'd be right to think so, given what just happened.
***
The scream splits the night sometime after two.
I'm at her door before I'm conscious of moving. One second I'm on the couch, the next I'm pushing through into darkness, eyes adjusting to the shadows.
"Eden."
She's thrashing. Sheets tangled around her legs, pinning her to the mattress. Her spine arches, her fingers claw at nothing, and the sounds coming out of her are raw and broken and barely human.
"Please—" The word rips out of her throat. "Please, stop, please—"
"Eden. Wake up."
