“You’ll be safe,” he says as he walks toward the front door.
“You can’t just leave me here.”
“You have everything you need here.”
When I hear the door unlock, survival kicks in, and every instinct is a live wire firing through my veins. My gaze narrows on the opening, and I’m trying to figure out if I’ll be strong enough to fight him, strong enough to push that door open just a little more so I can run.
Adrenaline surges, hot and electric, spilling down into my legs. My body is already calculating distance. The door. The handle. The seconds it would take to reach it before he’s fully outside.
I shift my weight, muscles ready to act when his head turns—a single calculated motion.
“Don’t.” One word. It doesn’t land like a threat. There’s no edge to it. No raised voice. No promise of consequence. It lands like certainty. Like he already knows what I was about to do. Like he knows me well enough to stop me with a single syllable.
My pulse is violent in my throat, my fingers curled, my body caught between impulse and something far more dangerous. Hesitation. “I told you I’ll never stop fighting.”
“Then I suggest you eat. Build up your strength.” He turns fully this time and walks out, boots heavy, each footfall a dull, hollow thud that marks his departure.
“Wait, please. At least tell me your name before you leave.”
The door shuts with the finality of a coffin lid—not slammed in anger but closed with deliberate care. The lock clicks into place, a small sound with devastating implications. Final. Mechanical. Unforgiving.
I stand there longer than I should, staring at the door like it might open again, like he might step back in and finish what he almost said. He doesn’t.
I feel the first sting of tears threatening to spill over, so I draw in a shuddering breath, letting it out slowly, trying to gather myself. I pull my palms down my face—inhale, exhale—suppressing the need to scream.
And then I see it. A heart-shaped lollipop. Glossy. Saturated hot pink—almost neon beneath the thin, crinkled layer of clear plastic.
It’s been placed deliberately beside the spot where I slept. He must have—but why?
It’s absurdly sweet. The kind of thing you’d give a child. A date. Not a captive. And yet something in me tightens instead of softens. A flicker of recognition without context. Like a memory pressing at the edge of my mind and refusing to surface. It shouldn’t feel familiar. It does.
The recognition crawls under my skin, subtle and wrong, and it unnerves me enough that I move without thinking. I cross the room in three quick steps, snatch the lollipop off the floor, the plastic crinkling loudly in my grip.
A sharp, panicked cry tears out of me, and I rip the wrapper away, fingers shaking, and crush the candy in my fist. It splinters with a brittle snap, shards biting into my palm as the stick snaps clean in half.
I yank open the trash and throw the pieces inside, slamming the lid down like that will erase it. He’s screwing with my head. Making sure I can’t learn him. Can’t predict him. Can’t survive him.
“Fuck!” I cry out, slamming my fist into the kitchen counter.
Pain erupts instantly—sharp, electric—shooting up my knuckles and into my wrist. The impact jars my bones, rattles through my arm, but I welcome it. It’s clean. It’s real. It’s something I can understand.
The sting blooms, skin already reddening, and I press my palm flat against the wood like I’m trying to drive the hurt deeper. Anything to drown out the sick, crawling feeling under my skin, thoughts racing back to what he said earlier.
Quiet means someone’s thinking.I’ve only heard those words once before. It was a small voice that said it. Curious. Gentle. Watching me the way children do when they’re trying to decide if you’re safe. It was the day a boy who barely spoke at all noticed that my silence wasn’t menace simmering. It was care. Understanding.
It was the day I realized, without a doubt, that changing a child’s life for the better was the closest thing to touching God, and that empathy could change the shape of someone’s life forever.
It was the day I met Ethan. Andhehas no way of knowing that. I never speak about the kids I help to anyone. Their lives, their trust—it’s not mine to share. There’s no way for him to know what those words mean to me.
Unless he does.
I look toward the stairs that lead up to the hallway, to the room with the steel door, and suddenly there’s this sinking, cold feeling that I’ve been asking the wrong questions, wondering the wrong things when the true question is not whether I know him…but how long he’s known me.
October 28th, 2023
It’s properly autumn now. The kind that actually means it. Cold mornings, the smell of woodsmoke, leaves coming down faster than they went up.
I walked through the park today, and the trees were doing that thing where they can’t decide between gold and red and end up being both at once, and I stood there longer than I needed to.
