I pick up the muffin. Take another bite.
It’s the best thing I’ve ever eaten, and I will take that to my grave.
I stand there for a moment in the quiet he left behind, then turn and find the lollipop still sitting on the couch where I dropped it. Pink. Heart-shaped. The same kind as the one I found yesterday.
He doesn’t do anything without a reason. I understood that much within the first hour.
I just don’t know yet what the reason is.
But I’m going to find out. Not because I have to.
Because I want to.
July 11th, 2023
Couldn’t sleep last night. Kept turning over, sheets tangled around my legs, pillow too warm. Ended up staring at the ceiling for hours.
And I started thinking about mountains. I don’t know why mountains. My brain does what it wants at 2 a.m.
But I kept thinking, what would it be like to sleep somewhere high up? Really high. Glass walls, nothing between you and the sky, the whole world spread out below like it finally decided to give you some breathing room.
You’d wake up, and the first thing you’d see wouldn’t be a ceiling. It would be clouds. Actual clouds, right there, going about their business.
I think that would do something to a person. Wake up enough mornings inside the clouds and you’d stop feeling so heavy. Stop feeling like the world was something happening to you and start feeling like you were just part of it.
Up there with the clouds and the quiet and the sky doing its slow thing overhead. Bliss.
Oh, and my bedroom ceiling has a water stain that looks like a map of a country that doesn’t exist.
12
SOPHIA
Sleep doesn’t come.
It hasn’t for two hours, maybe three. The living area is dark except for the low ember glow of the fireplace across the room, and I’ve been lying here on my makeshift floor bed watching the shadows move on the ceiling like they have somewhere to be.
From a mistake I made.
Five words. That’s all he gave me, and somehow it’s too much and not enough simultaneously, sitting in my chest like something I swallowed wrong, lodged somewhere between my sternum and my throat where I can’t reach it.
I turn onto my side. Stare at the couch. Turn back.
The floor is harder than it was yesterday, which is objectively impossible, and yet here we are.
There’s a bedroom upstairs. He told me it was open. He said it without pressure, without agenda, and I said I’d stay on the floor, and I meant it—I meant it because accepting anythingfrom him feels like losing ground, like conceding something I can’t afford to concede, like the slow creep of a line I didn’t draw carefully enough.
I turn onto my other side.
The pillow’s too firm, lofts my head too high, so I mold it, punching the inflated middle trying to force some compromise. It doesn’t work.
I inhale deep. It’s fine. I’m fine. I’ve slept in worse conditions than this. I once slept in a hospital chair for three nights straight when one of my cases—a seven-year-old who didn’t have anyone else—needed someone to stay. I can handle a floor and a stubborn pillow.
From a mistake I made.
I press my eyes shut.
The thing about those words is they keep rearranging themselves. Every time I think I’ve settled on what they mean, they shift into something else. A mistake he made. Not something donetohim. Somethinghedid. Something that has consequences he’s trying to contain. Something that apparently requires keeping a woman locked in a mountain house indefinitely. Something that requires apple cinnamon muffins and a hand he let me wrap in gauze and a room he said was open if I changed my mind.
