“I think you know the answer to that.”
Her chin lifts. “So it’s marry you or…or…die.”
I don’t respond. It’s not a question. She already knows the answer.
She’s quiet for a long moment. The dryers rattle through their cycles. The fluorescent lights cast their flat, indifferent glare on both of us.
One of the other people feeds quarters into a machine. The mundane sound of it feels obscene next to what I'm asking.
“I’ll give you time to consider the offer.” It’s a redundant gesture, giving her the illusion that she has free agency. We both know there’s no choice here. Not really. I pull out a burner with only one number in it—mine—and hold it out. “You have twenty-four hours.”
She takes it, and when her fingers brush my palm, that same jolt moves through the contact, sizzling and jarring. Her fingers close around the phone, and she steps back ike she's been stung.
“Twenty-four hours,” I repeat, then walk out.
The rain has picked back up. I sit in my car on the other side of the street with the engine off and watch through the plateglass as she sinks into the plastic chair and buries her face in her hands.
After a moment, she wraps her own hand around her wrist—left circling right, pressing where my fingers were—and holds it. The way a person touches a place that’s still tingling.
Some emotion surfaces and catches behind my ribs. It’s not an emotion I can name—I've never had to name the ones that matter, because I've never had any of the ones that matter. So, it sits there, unnamed, but doesn't leave.
I wrap my hands on the steering wheel, continuing to watch and wait.
Chapter 3
Saoirse
Leaving the laundromat, I briskly walk six blocks farther from O’Rourke territory, as if that distinction means anything for my safety.
Why is it that some people seem to have such simple, easy lives without danger lurking around every corner? What would it even feel like to not have to live in fight or flight mode all the time?
What’s worse, every time I look down, my hand is wrapped around my own wrist, touching myself the way he touched me.
I walk the streets in the rain with my duffel over my shoulder, my head down, and the phone he gave me pressing against my hip through my jacket pocket. It’s a small rectangular device that feels like a thousand-pound weight.
There’s a shelter on Western with walk-in beds and no questions, but they closed their doors at midnight.
I’m not gonna sleep tonight anyway. I make a few stops, a few attempts, but every time I close my eyes—standing in a doorway, sitting on a bench, leaning against the wall of a parking garage where the concrete still holds a little of the day’swarmth—I see the murder play out behind my lids. A man on his knees. Muffled begging. Declan O’Rourke’s face in the faint glow of the security light, flat, hollow, and mechanical.
But that’s not what keeps jerking me awake.
It's the laundromat. The scrape of the plastic chair. The way his hand closed around my wrist.
I rub the spot again without thinking—left hand circling right, pressing where his fingers were. The skin isn't bruised. He didn't grip hard enough to bruise, which is telling. The heat of his palm. The way his fingers overlapped with room to spare. How my pulse hammered against his thumb. He felt it. I know he felt it.
I catch myself pressing my wrist again and yank my hand away.
My backstory sucks. It’s the story of a girl who had to fight to survive before she learned to read.
I've lived in fourteen foster homes.
Fourteen. Including the Bradleys, who locked the pantry and counted the slices of bread. The Morales family was decent until Mr. Morales lost his job and started drinking. The Petersons had four other fosters and treated us all as a workforce. Mrs. Calvert used a hot curling iron as discipline. I trace the small burn scar on my forearm without looking at it—automatically, the way a Catholic touches a rosary bead.
Then there was the last foster father. I don't say his name. Not even inside my own head. He is footsteps, heavy and deliberate, pausing outside my door in the dead hours of the night. The turn of the doorknob, testing whether I'd remembered to wedge a chair under the handle. Loud breathing that carried through the wood when the chair held. Patient breathing. Breathing that saidI’ll wait.There will come a time.
And a time came.
The night the chair didn't hold, I went through the window. From the second story. The drop jarred my knees and stung my ankles, and I ran barefoot for six blocks before I stopped to vomit in someone's flower garden. I was fourteen years old with no shoes, no bag, and no money. I had nothing but the nightgown I was wearing and the understanding that I was alone in the world. No one was coming for me.
