"Okay," I said.
"Okay. So here's what I want you to do. I want you to get up off the floor."
"I don't think my legs work."
"They work. They carried you out of a place that wanted to keep you. They carried you up the stairs to your apartment. They work, Molly. Trust them."
I pressed my palm flat against the door behind me and pushed. My legs shook—not the fine, neurological tremor of withdrawal, which had mostly resolved, but the deep, muscular unsteadiness of a body running on adrenaline and grief and the physical memory of being held that was still imprinted on my skin like a sunburn. I stood. The apartment rearranged itself around me from the floor-level perspective of a woman in crisis to the standing-level perspective of a woman who was, technically, upright. The tulips were still yellow. The window was still new. The suitcase was still packed.
"I'm up," I said.
"Good. Now I want you to unpack one thing. Just one. Open the suitcase and take out one item and put it somewhere that feels right. Not where it should go. Where it feels right."
I stared at the suitcase. The blue fabric. The extended handle. The luggage tag I'd written my name on in Xavier's kitchen with a Sharpie that smelled like his junk drawer—coffee grounds and rubber bands and the faint, ineradicable scent of a man I loved.
I unzipped it.
On top was the coloring book. The woodland animals one—the rabbit in the underwater garden, surrounded by confused fish and a disgruntled orange tabby sticker. I hadn't packed it consciously. Or maybe I had. Maybe some part of me—the part Emily called the Little part, the part I'd been burying for four weeks under adult clothes and simple braids and the deliberate, systematic excision of every soft thing—had slipped it in when the rest of me wasn't looking.
I pulled it out. Held it against my chest the way I'd held Xavier's pillow an hour ago, both arms wrapped around it, theglossy cover cool against my collarbone. It smelled like colored pencils. Like Clare's perfume. Like the afternoon I'd cried on the rabbit and Clare had said he's a garden rabbit, he's used to rain, and I'd laughed and cried at the same time and felt, for the first time since the rooftop, like a person instead of a patient.
"I have it," I said into the phone. "The coloring book."
"Where does it feel right?"
I looked around the apartment. The kitchen counter was too exposed. The bathroom was too small. The closet was—
The nightstand. The one beside my bed. The small, scarred wooden surface that had held a lamp and a water glass and, before all of this, a dog-eared copy of whatever novel I'd been reading before the world had ended. It was bare now, cleared by whoever had prepped the apartment for my return. Empty the way Xavier's nightstand had been empty before he'd started leaving notes on it. Notes signedDaddywith a capital D.
I walked into the bedroom. My legs held. Anna was right about that. And I knew they'd carried me out of worse places than an empty apartment, and the fact that they were shaking didn't mean they were failing. Shaking and failing were different things. I was learning that.
I set the coloring book on the nightstand. Propped it up against the lamp base so I could see the rabbit, the garden, the autumn leaves, the expression of uncomplicated peace on a cartoon face that had no idea how much weight it was carrying right now. It looked small and absurd and completely out of place against the fresh white walls and the new sheets and the aggressive blankness of a room that had been scrubbed of its history. It looked like the first word of a sentence I hadn't finished writing yet.
"It's on my nightstand," I told Anna. "The coloring book. Next to where I sleep."
"How does that feel?"
I stared at the rabbit. At the sticker—the grumpy orange tabby, slightly warped from the tears that had fallen on the page, still stubbornly adhered to the corner where Emily had pressed it down with her thumb. At the yellow butterfly I'd colored with trembling hands while Clare held them steady. At the teal seaweed that had once been garden leaves before Clare had unilaterally decided my rabbit needed an ocean.
"Like a beginning," I said. And then, because honesty was the only currency I had left: "Like a beginning that hurts."
"Most of them do." Anna's voice was warm in my ear, warm the way chamomile was warm, warm the way a blanket was warm. "Molly, I want you to know something. What you did tonight in leaving a place of safety voluntarily, walking into discomfort by choice, calling me instead of him, isn't the behavior of a woman who can't distinguish between love and dependency. That's the behavior of a woman who knows exactly what she feels and is willing to suffer for the integrity of it."
The tears came again. Quieter this time. Not the panicked, gasping sobs from the floor by the door, but the kind of crying that came from a well that wouldn't run dry tonight and maybe not tomorrow either, but that wasn't trying to drown me. Just flowing. The way water flowed. The way it was supposed to.
"He asked me to stay," I whispered. "He begged me, Anna. He said he was wrong about all of it. And I said no."
"How did that feel?"
"Like cutting off my own arm to prove I could survive without it."
Anna was quiet for a moment. Not the clinical silence of a therapist formulating a response, but the human silence of a woman sitting with the weight of what I'd just said and honoring it with her attention.
"Can I tell you something that isn't strictly therapeutic?" she asked.
"Please."
"The fact that he asked you to stay, the fact that he reversed his own conditions when faced with losing you, tells me something important about where he is in this process. And the fact that you said no and held the boundary even when he couldn't, tells me something important about where you are. You're not in the same place, Molly. You're ahead of him right now. And that's okay. That's actually—" She paused, and I heard something in the pause that sounded almost like admiration. "That's actually remarkable."
