"Mr. Holland," she says. "I'm Cath. I've been hired to look after you."
Her eyes move to the scratched lines on the wall behind the mattress. The water bottles. The energy bar wrappers I've folded into a neat pile because neatness is the last thing I have control over. She takes all of it in and her jaw tightens.
She sets the grocery bag on the floor and puts the vitamin bottle on top of it.
"I'm going to be here most days," she says. "I'll bring your meals myself from now on. Proper food, not that garbage they've been giving you."
She's talking to me but she's also talking to whoever is listening. There are no cameras in my cell that I've been able to find, but the walls are thin and if they’re not watching, I’ll eat the wrappers that I’ve so carefully folded.
"Thank you," I say.
"You're welcome, love." She straightens and smooths her jacket. "I'll have dinner ready by six. Is there anything you can't eat? Allergies, things that set off the morning sickness?"
"Anything that’s strong flavored."
"Noted." She picks up the grocery bag and goes to the door. One of the guards is standing outside. She turns back to meand her face is professional, neutral, the face of a woman who has managed a casino floor for eighteen years and can keep her expression blank through anything.
But her eyes. For one second, her eyes meet mine and they say everything her mouth can't.
He's coming.
The door closes. The bolt slides.
The baby kicks. It's been kicking more often the last week, strong enough now that I can feel distinct limbs pushing against the wall of my abdomen. A heel, maybe. Or an elbow. Something small and sharp and alive.
"Okay," I whisper. "Okay."
Dom knows where I am. Cath is inside. Whatever happens next is going to happen soon.
I need to be ready.
The problem is that I don't know what ready looks like. I'm fifteen weeks pregnant with no shoes, no weapon, no knowledge of the building's layout beyond the ten-by-twelve room I've been staring at for two months.
I know the sound of the bolt and the number of steps to the door and exactly none of that helps.
I'm also exhausted in a way that sleep doesn't fix. The kind of exhaustion that lives in your bones. Weeks of concrete and fluorescent light and the slow, grinding erosion of having no control over anything. My body has been running on adrenaline and prenatal vitamins and the stubborn refusal to fall apart.
But Cath is here. And somewhere out there, Dom is making plans.
I press my hand against the kick.
Cath comes back at six with a plate of chicken and rice and steamed vegetables. It's the first hot meal that didn't come out of a paper bag since I was taken. The chicken is seasoned. Therice is fluffy. The vegetables are cooked properly, not boiled into mush.
I eat all of it sitting on the mattress while she stands by the door and watches me with the same expression Dom used to have when he'd send food down from the kitchen and check the surveillance feed to see if I'd eaten it.
The thought catches me off guard. The comparison. Dom watching me eat on a camera. Cath watching me eat from three feet away. Both of them checking. Both of them caring, in the practical, unsentimental way that people care when the person they're looking after won't admit they need looking after.
"Good?" Cath says.
"Good."
She takes the plate. "I'll bring breakfast at seven. Oatmeal all right?"
"Oatmeal is fine."
She leaves. The bolt slides.
I lie on the mattress and for the first time in nine weeks, my stomach is full of real food and someone who is on my side is thirty yards away in the main house and I think I might actually get out of here.
