Or maybe he was always both, and I just couldn't tell which load he was bearing.
I lean into his chest. Let my head fall against his collarbone. Close my eyes.
His hand keeps moving. Slow circles on my back. The bread appears at my lips at intervals I stop tracking. Small enough that my stomach accepts each piece before the next arrives. Olive oil on his fingertips. The faint salt of the cheese.
"The doctor said your blood work came back mostly clear," he says against my hair. "Dehydrated. Malnourished. Hormone levels elevated, but he attributed that to the trauma and physical stress."
I nod against his chest. Elevated hormones. Three weeks of daily terror will do that to a person.
"He wants to run another panel in a week."
"Fine."
"Violet."
"I said fine."
His chin rests on the top of my head. The circles on my back don't stop. I eat because his voice is low and steady and asks for nothing except that I stay alive, and right now that feels like enough. That feels like everything.
After he helps me shower, after I stand under water so hot it turns my skin pink and scrub until my arms shake and then scrub some more, after he wraps me in a towel and dresses me in joggers that are too long and a hoodie that smells like him and has to be rolled at the sleeves three times, he settles into the chair by the window.
I end up in his lap again. Not because he pulls me there. Because the chair is wide and deep, and he's in it, and the three feet between the chair and the bed might as well be an ocean.
We sit. We watch the garden through the window. Birds cut across the blue, small and fast, and the orange trees sway in the breeze.
I start speaking because I need to. Because if I don't say it now, the cell will keep it, and I'm not giving that place one more thing.
"The first day after they took me, they put me in a concrete room. It was pitch black, I couldn't see my own hands."
Against my back, his chest goes still. Not breathing. Holding.
"There was a man in there with me."
Every muscle under me turns to stone.
"His name is Matt. He teaches English in a school in Connecticut." My voice is doing that flat thing it does when it's reciting facts instead of living them. "He said he got drugged at a nightclub in Palermo. Woke up in the same place."
Elio's breathing resumes.
"He shared his food with me. Talked to me when I was on the edge of giving up. When they moved us to the bigger space, he ended up in the cell next to mine." I swallow. The next part catches in my throat like glass. "He stood up for me. Distracted guards. Got between me and them when they came for me. He got..." The word sticks. I push through it. "Beaten. Repeatedly. And worse. Because he was trying to protect me."
Elio's jaw works against the top of my head. A micro-movement. If I weren't pressed against his chest I'd miss it.
"Then he has my gratitude."
I can't decode his tone, and I'm too tired to try.
Respira. Ricorda. Resisti.
Elena's voice is in my head, low and fierce and Italian, the three words she pressed into me like tools, like weapons. I can't stop thinking about her. Is she here? Among the women Elio pulled from that building? Or did she use the sharp rock she'd hidden and find her own way out before anyone came?
Breathe.
I'm doing that. The air in this room tastes like orange trees and the absence of fear.
Remember.
I can't stop doing that. The cell. The dark. Matt's voice through the chain-link.
