My eyebrows flicker with surprise, but I quickly school my expression.
“You’re in my home. Your only option is to trust me.”
“Perhaps,” she murmurs before climbing the stairs, looking all too small in my black shirt and jacket.
I watch her go as I stand in the entrance hall in the quiet of my own house.
Then I take out my phone and make the third call.
Mia
I don't sleep.
Not really. I do the thing where you lie in the dark with your eyes closed and your body horizontal while your brain absolutely refuses to cooperate. Instead, it runs the same footage on a loop that gets slightly worse every time. The kitchen. The smell. His hand on my wrist. The sound. The blood.
I give up around five and just lie there watching the ceiling instead.
It's a very nice ceiling. High, corniced, the plaster a shade of warm ivory in the morning light. The room itself is beautiful. Big, quiet, furnished in the way that means someone with real taste made real decisions rather than just pointing at the expensive option in a catalogue. There are books on the small shelf by the window. An actual painting on the wall, not a print. Linen on the bed so smooth and fresh it feels not quite real.
I'm lying in a beautiful bed, in a beautiful room, trying not to think about the murder I committed.
By the time the sky behind the curtains shifts from black to grey, I've gone through it enough times that it's started to feel less like replaying and more like filing. Like my brain is slowly, reluctantly, moving it from the category of things that are happening right now into the category of things that happened, past tense, finished. I don't know if that's healthy or not. Isuspect a therapist would have opinions. Since I don't currently have access to a therapist, I'm going to call it progress and move on.
I should be more troubled by the fact that I followed a stranger to the middle of nowhere without a fight. That I handed him the whole disaster the moment he said tell me from the beginning and sat there listening with those dark eyes and that expression that gave nothing away, and somehow made me feel like the information was safe to share with him…
But I'm mostly just exhausted and faintly, distantly grateful, which probably says something about my state of mind that definitely needs a therapist.
There's a soft knock at the door just after seven.
I pull myself upright, push the hair out of my face, look down at myself. I’m still in the shirt, still a complete disaster, and say "come in.”
The woman who opens the door is the same small, warm, woman who I saw last night. She is somewhere in her sixties, with grey hair pulled back and the particular energy of someone who has run a large household for a very long time and has very clear feelings about how things should be done. She's carrying a folded pile of clothes, and she smiles at me without any of the careful wariness I might've expected from someone who clearly knows something unusual is going on.
"Good morning," she says with a slight accent. "I'm Pavlina. Mr Dubovich asked me to find you something more comfortable to wear." She sets the clothes on the end of the bed. "Breakfast will be ready downstairs when you are."
I look at the clothes. Jeans, a soft grey jumper, underwear still in its packaging. All roughly the right size.
"Thank you," I say. "These are…how did you know the size?"
She gives me a look that says I've been doing this a very long time, sweetheart. "Lucky guess," she says, and leaves me to it.
The shower is extraordinary. The water pressure alone nearly makes me emotional, which tells me quite a lot about my current resilience levels. I stand under it for longer than is strictly necessary. I keep my eyes closed as the almost-too-hot water runs over me, soaking my hair and skin, washing away everything that happened. When the water runs clear I finally take a deep inhale and think: okay. Okay.
I feel more human when I get out. Less like a person things are happening to and more like a person who might be capable of making a decision.
The jeans fit. The jumper is soft in a way that tells me it’s more expensive than anything I’ve ever worn before. When I look at myself in the mirror, I look like myself again, mostly. A version of myself that hasn't slept and has slightly hollow eyes but is otherwise functioning. Which will have to do.
I find a comb in the bathroom cabinet. Drag it through my hair. Pull it back into a loose ponytail.
I look at the woman in the mirror for a moment, take a deep breath, and head downstairs.
The house is quiet, and my feet are silent on the stair carpet. The hallway at the bottom is all dark wood and clean lines, a wide front door at one end, a corridor running back toward what I assume is the kitchen. I can smell coffee. Real coffee, the kind that requires actual equipment and intention, not the pod-machine kind.
I follow it.
There are voices before I reach the door.
Low. Male. More than one. I slow without meaning to, the way you slow when you realise, you're about to walk into something you weren't expecting, and I stop just short of the doorway.
