I don’t use them.
I go back to the mop. Back to the wet, waiting floors. Back to the task that asks for nothing but my labor. Back to the work that does not ask me to explain myself, to justify my choices, to defend my terror against someone who has never felt it.
I had begun to grow comfortable. I had started to let my guard down. I had started to believe that I could belong somewhere.
That was my mistake.
I forget the first rule of survival.
Kindness is not a constant.
Not for me.
And people, even good people, will eventually find the most tender part of you and press. Because they do not understand. Because they have never had to learn that some wounds do not heal clean, that leaving is not always as simple as walking out the door.
My hands tighten around the mop handle.
I will not make the mistake of forgetting again.
Chapter Eight: Nora
It’s been a week since the argument.
A week since I let my guard down. A week since I opened my mouth and let the truth fall out like a wild thing, a parasite that had been clawing at the inside of my ribs, demanding to be born.
A week since Maeve’s anger stripped me bare—peeled back the careful layers I have been building since I was seven years old, exposed the raw, trembling thing underneath, and then walked away.
A week of her words echoing in the quiet of my mind.
Staying when you have a choice.
Playing the martyr.
You are choosing this.
Each repetition a little heavier, until the weight of them made my chest feel tight. I carry them with me now, the way I used to carry the taste of concrete and the memory of locked doors. They have joined the others. They have found their place in the hollow.
And a week of her carefully avoiding me.
When I enter the front, she finds a reason to be in the back. The storage room needs organizing. The schedule needs adjusting. The order needs checking. There is always a reason. Always a door closing behind her just as I walk through thefront. If our glances threaten to meet, hers darts away, quick and final.
I don’t blame her. I was the one who broke the unspoken rule. The rule I have known my whole life but forgot, for a few foolish months, in the warmth of her kindness. The rule that says:do not be seen.Do not be heard.Do not show the wound.Do not make people uncomfortable with the shape of your pain.
I was the one who spoke when I should have stayed silent. I was the one who thought, for one terrible, hopeful moment, that I could be seen without being hurt.
Now the one thing that is truly mine—the first choice I ever made for myself, the first door I walked through without permission, the first job I ever earned with my own two hands—feels like it’s slipping through my fingers.
Every day, after my shift or under the guise of errands—I need to pick up milk,I need to buy more eggs,I forgot something at the store—I walk the streets with a new, desperate purpose. My eyes scan every shop window, every community board, every lamppost for a flyer, a sign, anything. A square of paper with a phone number. A handwritten note taped to a door. A promise of work that does not depend on Maeve’s forgiveness.
Cleaning jobs.
Only those.
I look for the work I know. The work that asks nothing of my mind, only the obedience of my hands. The work that has given me the first money I have ever earned, the first bank account I have ever owned, the first small, trembling sense that I am more than what he made me.
I hate this new ritual. The walking. The searching. The small, hopeful flutter every time I see a piece of paper taped to a window, followed by the slow, sinking disappointment when I get close enough to read it and it is not what I need. The uncertainty is a cold knot in my stomach.
But I need a lifeboat. I need a plan for the day Maeve tells me not to come back. For the day she pulls me aside and saysI’m sorry, Nora, but this isn’t working outand hands me an envelope with my last paycheck and a smile that does not reach her eyes.
