It hovers. Circling. Looking for the neural pathway that leads to a coherent response and finding that the path has been rerouted through territory I don’t visit. Territory with locked doors and caution tape and the specific kind of silence that exists in rooms where bad things happened and good lighting was never installed.
Did I want to?—
The memory surfaces.
Not gradually. Not with the soft fade-in that nostalgia employs for palatable recollections. This one arrives the way all the bad ones arrive—fully formed, high-definition, sensory-complete.
Rain.
Heavy rain, the kind that turns city streets into rivers and alleys into corridors of sound where the water hitting concrete creates a white noise dense enough to swallow a voice.
Running. My boots slipping. My body wrong—the heat building beneath the suppressants that weren’t strong enough yet, the biology breaking through the chemical barrier with the unstoppable insistence of a system that doesn’t care about professional obligations or personal preferences.
The alley. The dead end. The wall I couldn’t climb.
Shadows in the mouth of the passage. White teeth in the dark.
The leader’s voice: “That’s not the way to help your pack, Officer.”
Hands I didn’t consent to. A wall against my back. Rain and tears indistinguishable on my face because both were cold and both were falling and neither could wash away what was happening.
The bruises afterward. Purple and green on my thighs, my wrists, the places where grip becomes restraint that becomes evidence, that I covered with long sleeves and foundation and the particular, practiced composure of a woman who goes to morning briefing the day after with her hair in regulation compliance and her report filed on time.
The doors I started locking. The showers at two a.m. The towel pressed to my mouth to muffle what my body needed to release and my pride refused to acknowledge.
One of many nights.
One of many.
I don’t know how long I’m quiet.
The apartment exists around me in a state of suspended animation—three men waiting, the October light holding its angle through the window, the coffee cooling in mugs that no one is drinking because the air has changed and everyone in the room can feel it except, apparently, me.
When I answer, my voice is level.
Steady.
The same tone I use for witness statements, incident reports, case debriefs—the professional monotone that exists specifically for the purpose of converting lived experience into clinical data.
“Well…no.”
The word is small.
Smaller than a word should be from a woman who has commanded departments and dissolved units and karate-chopped a six-four Alpha in his sleep. But it comes out the size it needs to be, which is barely above a whisper, because anything louder would require me to hear myself say it.
“I had to,” I continue, and the phrase is so practiced, so deeply embedded in my vocabulary of self-narration, that it leaves my mouth with the frictionless ease of something that’s been said a thousand times in the privacy of my own head. “Cause I was about to have my heat. And it was raining. And they…cornered me into an alleyway.”
I shrug.
The gesture is the same one I’ve been deploying all morning—the physical shorthand forit is what it is, the body’s way of minimizing what the mind has already filed underthings that happened that I don’t examine because examining them would require acknowledging that they shouldn’t have happened.
“And well…”
I look away.
At the window. At the October sky beyond it, pale and indifferent. At anything that isn’t the three faces at the table.
“It’s not a big deal or anything. That’s just life, rig?—”
