"Lucia." Matt says it back to her like it matters. Like her name is the most important word in any language. "That's beautiful. Now you can introduce yourself to anyone. Anywhere."
He's teaching them how to ask for water. How to say their names. How to tell someonenoin a language the world might listen to.
And then it happens.
One of the women, the oldest in the group, with hands that haven't stopped shaking since I first saw her in the compound, attempts to repeat something Matt said and gets the pronunciation so catastrophically wrong that it comes out sounding like an Italian curse word instead of the English phrase she was aiming for. Matt's face goes wide open with surprise. The woman next to her claps a hand over her mouth. And then.
Laughter.
Not loud. Not the kind that fills a room at a party or rolls through a bar on a Friday night. Small and startled and slightly terrified of itself, like it can't believe it's being allowed to exist.But real. Real laughter from a woman who a week ago was behind a chain-link fence in a warehouse where people were sold.
Matt laughs too, that easy, open sound, and mimes the mix-up with exaggerated hand gestures, and the woman laughs harder, and something in my chest cracks in a direction that isn't down.
He doesn't see me yet. So I watch.
He's healing fast, the bruises from the compound, the ones that mottled his face like a bad watercolor, that swelled his jaw and blackened both his eyes, they're almost gone. Cuts closed over, color back in his cheeks, shoulders squared again instead of hunched. Like his body took one look at three weeks of hell and decided it was a temporary inconvenience, thanks, moving on. Meanwhile I'm still limping, still bruised in colors that haven't been invented yet, still waking up with my fists clenched so tight my nails leave crescents in my palms.
I walk over and settle onto the wall beside him. The stone is warm through my linen pants. Sun on my face. Real sun.
"You're looking annoyingly healthy," I tell him.
He shrugs one shoulder. "Good genes. Too stubborn to stay hurt. Also I think one of the doctors slipped me vitamins. I'm suspicious."
"You got a superpower I should know about? Some secret healing thing?"
That laugh again. Open and easy and completely devoid of anything sharp. The opposite of every other sound in my life right now. "Superpower. Right. My superpower is a JV basketball record of three and twenty-two and the ability to make thirty teenagers care about Shakespeare for forty-five minutes. Fear me."
I bump his shoulder with mine. The contact sends a small, uncomplicated pulse of warmth through me, the kind thatdoesn't come with conditions or complications or the smell of blood.
"You're my superhero," I say. "You know that, right? Always will be."
His face softens. Surprise flickering in his eyes as the tips of his ears pinken, his mouth opening and closing. He looks down at the napkin in his hands.
"I'm really not," he says quietly.
"You really are." And I mean it, every syllable, because in that cell he was the reason I made it. He shared his bread when he had nothing. He put his body between me and the things that came through the door. He talked about his students and his basketball team and a town called Hamden until the dark got small enough to survive.
"In that cell," I say, "you were the reason."
He doesn't look up for a long moment.
"Elena's struggling," I say. Because I have to say it to someone, and Matt is the only person in this fortress who'd understand without a paragraph of context. We share a vocabulary no one else here speaks. The compound is our country, and we're the only two who hold passports.
His face falls. "She is? she was the strongest one."
"Being strong in there isn't the same as surviving out here."
The fountain murmurs. Somewhere in the half-circle, one of the women is practicingwater, water, waterunder her breath, getting closer each time.
Matt doesn't fill the silence. I don't either. We've gotten good at that. Three weeks of practice.
I can't help the feeling of guilt that floods me. I've been smiling today. In this garden. In this sunlight. Shoulder-to-shoulder with a man who makes the world feel like a place you can stand up in, while ten meters away and one floor up, Elena stares at a wall and talks about cages that never open.
I don't deserve the garden. Or the laughter. Or the warm stone. Or the uncomplicated goodness of the man beside me, who makes broken women laugh by butchering Italian words with the enthusiasm of a golden retriever learning tricks.
I got lucky. That's all. That's the whole difference between me sitting in this garden and Elena lying in that bed. Lucky that Elio came. Lucky that Matt was in my cell instead of someone who'd have traded me for an extra meal. Lucky that someone reserved me, and no one could touch me. Lucky, lucky, lucky.
I'm so fucking tired of luck being the only thing that separates the living from the dead.
