There's also the young girl, the one Matt got his nose almost broken for. She's sitting by the window with a blanket pulled up to her chin, staring at the garden below. When I step in, her gaze snaps to me, then to the door behind me, measuring the distance.
I smile at her, but she doesn't smile back. She doesn't look away, either, and for now that's the whole victory.
You'd think rescue would be the easy part. You'd think the compound was the worst of it, and after that everything tilts toward okay. But some of these women are healing, some are holding, and some are doing that thing where you look fine from the outside but the whole interior is load-bearing on nothing, and one wrong gust takes the structure down. Those are the ones I worry about most.
I make it through nine rooms before I get to the one I've been avoiding. My hand rests on the handle and doesn't move. I hate myself a little for this, for the fact that this wasn't the first door I came to, that I've been putting off this visit for days, choosing the easier rooms instead. The ones that didn't make me want to press my forehead against a wall and scream until I ran dry.
She taught me to breathe in that compound. She pressed herself against chain-link and gave me three words that kept me alive when everything else failed, and I repay her by visiting her last.
Open the fucking door, Violet.
I push it open.
The room is beautiful. Cream walls, arched window, afternoon light pooling on terracotta tile. A vase of fresh flowerson the nightstand, someone's idea of kindness, someone who doesn't understand that kindness and a locked perimeter are not the same thing.
Elena is on the bed.
Lying on her side, facing the wall, but not sleeping. Her eyes are open. Fixed on a point in the plaster that holds nothing worth looking at. Her hair is lank, unwashed, pressed flat against the pillow in a shape that says she hasn't moved in hours. A soft blue cotton dress hangs off her frame like a sail with no wind.
This isn't the woman who taught me to breathe through chain-link.
This isn't the woman who hid a weapon, who planned an escape, and whisperedresistlike it was a promise she fully intended to keep.
This is what's left after the three words stop working on the person who made them.
"Hey," I say softly, the way you'd talk to someone standing on a ledge, which maybe isn't far off.
Nothing.
I sit on the edge of the bed. Take her hand.
Her fingers don't close around mine. Cool and slack, like holding a glove with no one inside it. The scaffolding is all there. But whatever animated it has pulled back to somewhere I can't reach.
An untouched plate sits on the nightstand. Bread, sliced fruit, cheese. The bread is going stale. The fruit is browning at the edges. Nobody's touched it. The flowers are mocking it.
My stomach rolls just looking at it, which has been my new normal. This persistent, low-grade nausea that hasn't gone away even though I've been eating for days now. The doctor said my body needs time to readjust after weeks of starvation. Makes sense.
I pick up the bread. Tear it in half.
Put one half to my lips.
Chew. Swallow. My throat fights me. My stomach lurches. But I keep it down because I can't ask her to do something I won't do myself, and right now this is the only language I have. I'm eating. You can too. See? It won't kill us.
Probably won't kill us.
Elena's gaze moves. Not to me.
To the bread.
A long moment. Long enough that I count three full breaths and start to think she's going to close her eyes and turn back to the wall. Then her hand, the one I'm not holding, reaches out. Slow. Like the air between her and the bread is thick, resistant, like she's moving through something heavier than gravity.
She picks up the other half.
Takes a bite so small it barely qualifies.
Something hot and sharp presses behind my eyes, climbing up my throat, and I swallow it back down with the taste of bread that's gone dry in my mouth. Because if I cry she'll stop eating, and this one tiny bite, this crumb, this nothing, this everything, is the only sign of life she's given since I walked in.
We sit in the quiet.
