The voice emanated from all around her, disembodied and familiar.
“Vivienne.”
The boy’s features distorted, his eyes sinking into the wide orbitals of his face. He sat bolt upright and grabbed hold of her chin. She thrashed against him, tangled in the ghostly shrouds of her skirt. It was no use. He didn’t relinquish his grasp. His grip was iron. His thumb dug hard into the hinge of her jaw, forcing open her mouth. Alkaline water poured down her throat, thick with silt, until she was choking on it.
“Where are you?” he demanded.“Where are you?”
She kicked and kicked, her lungs burning, stars bursting along her periphery.
“Vivienne!”
With an ice-water jolt, Vivienne found herself blinking in the yellow light of Blackwell’s bathroom. She was bone-dry and breathing hard, the floor beneath her empty of puddles. Thomas Walsh stood directly in front of her, cradling her jaw in his hands.
“You’re okay,” he said. “Hey.Look at me. You’re okay.”
She raised her gaze to his, taking in his familiarity like a touchstone. His face was as solemn as she’d ever seen it. His thumb traced over her cheek in an absent caress.
“There you are.”
He said it with such profound relief that it cracked her clean open. She flinched out of his reach like an animal, skidding hard into the wall. The hands that had just been holding her so very carefully went up in compliance.
“Easy,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
She tried to envision how he must have found her. Clawing at her own throat. Choking on nothing. All alone in a public restroom, pantomiming her own demise.
The thought was mortifying beyond imagination.
It felt too awful to keep standing there in abject silence, weathering his scrutiny. She hated being scrutinized.Hatedit. When she’d first stopped speaking, her mother and Philip had hired all sorts of doctors to poke at her and examine her. They put her in machines for hours on end, strapped to a table and shivering cold. They jabbed her with needles and lancets and finger pricks, until she became so tired of it, she resolved to make it stop.
She took to lying on the floor as though dead, eyes shut and arms askew, waiting for the maid to stumble upon her. Upsetting everyone just enough to leave her be.
A single tear escaped her lashes and rolled down her cheek, adding insult to injury.
“I used to have panic attacks,” Thomas said softly. “I don’t, uh—I don’t love small spaces. There was an incident when I was kid where—well, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that I had nightmares, after. I’d wake up convinced I couldn’t move my arms, or that I couldn’t breathe. It got so bad for a while that my mom finally made me see a therapist. She was kind of a whack job. The psychiatrist, I mean. She wasn’t awful or anything, it’s just that she was a real hippie about stuff. She used to make me do breathing exercises to these nature mixtapes.”
The bathroom door flew unexpectedly open. Thomas caught it mid-swing, wedging it closed. “This one’s occupied.”
“This is a multiple-use restroom” came a woman’s indignant voice.
Thomas’s only response was to reach over and turn the lock in a punctuativeclick.
“I’m getting the manager,” said the woman, shriller than before.
“Go ahead,” called Thomas.
They listened to the angry bite of heels on hardwood as the woman departed.
“My point is,” Thomas said, “she taught me this grounding exercise. She’d make me count my fingers. If the count was off, I knew I was having some kind of nightmare. If they were all there, I was awake.”
She stared up at him, unsure where he was going.
“I know it doesn’t sound like much,” he added, “but I swear it helped. Here—hold up a fist.”
Reluctantly, she obeyed. He mimicked her, unfolding his pinkie.
“One,” he began, and nodded when she followed suit. “Good—now two. Three. Four. Five.”
Their hands hung flush between them. Thomas’s throat corded in a swallow. He seemed to have forgotten the lesson entirely. Slowly, Vivienne fit her hand to his. The sudden contact jarred him into looking right at her. That hunted look was back in his eyes. The one he’d given her that first morning by the fountain. She felt the heat of it in her toes.
