I turn my head half an inch toward his voice. "Okay? That's what you have to say?"
"I'm not going to argue with your telling of your own life, Sadie."
I laugh. It's a thin brittle thing in the cold air. My eyes sting. I blink hard and keep walking.
"The thing that made me leave wasn't either of those. I want you to know that, because I think it matters. I looked the other way on both of those. But the thing I couldn't look the other way over was my insulin."
His footsteps stop.
I don't stop. I keep going, because if I stop I'm going to have to look at his face, and I can't bear the weight of his pity right now.
"I'm type one. I’m guessing you probably know that. I need insulin the way you need air. I had a pump for a while but the supplies were expensive and my insurance kept fighting me, so I went back to pens. Pens in the fridge. Pens in my bag. A routine. A system. You build a system when you have this disease, or you die from it."
I keep walking, but I’ve slowed my pace. I didn’t realize how saying all this out loud would be exhausting in its own way. He's moving again behind me now. I can hear him catching up.
"He started messing with them. Not all at once. Little things first. A pen wouldn’t be where I left it. A dose would be off. I thought I was going crazy. I thought I was miscounting. I started writing my doses down in a notebook I kept in my purse, which is a thing I never told anybody, and the numbers in the notebook didn't match the numbers in my meter, and I couldn't figure out why."
"Sadie."
His voice is low. Rougher than it was. But I can’t stop talking, even though my teeth are chattering now and I don’t think it’s from the cold.
"Then one day I watched him, from the hallway. I came home early from a shift because I had a migraine. I saw him through the crack in the kitchen door. He had my insulin pen. He had thedial. He was turning it. Then he put it back in the fridge and he left the room whistling."
I stop walking when I reach the corner of my apartment building.
I don't turn around. I stand in the middle of the sidewalk under a streetlight that's buzzing and flickering a little, and I look at my own breath in the air in front of me. My hands are in my pockets. I make them into fists.
"I went to Dr. Mehta the next morning, she ran the clinic where I worked. I told her what I saw. I told her my numbers had been all over the place for two months. She listened. She didn't tell me I was crazy. She told me she was taking over another clinic in another state, she was still looking for an MA. She told me I could be out in two weeks if I was careful. She told me not to tell him I was leaving."
My voice catches on the last part. I push through it.
"I ordered a moving van and packed my car when he left for work. You know the rest."
Nick doesn't say anything.
"I don't want a man in my life." I say it directly to him. "I've had a man in my life. I know what a man in my life does to me. I'm not doing it again, Nick. I'm not. I came here for a quiet life and a job I'm good at and an apartment where nobody touches my medication, and I'm not trading my peace for a man who wants to control me…or worse. I can’t let a man do that to me again. I won’t."
He takes a step into the light.
"That’s what you don’t understand about me, Sadie.” His hand comes up; his fingers touch my jaw again.
I go still. Every hair on my body goes still with me.
“I'm not a man," he says, almost apologetically. "I'm a monster."
His face is very calm, and something in the stillness of him feels deliberate, as if he's holding himself in place on purpose.
"I'm telling you that as a warning and as a promise," he says. "The difference between me and your piece of shit ex, is not that we’re not the same. The difference is that I'm honest about what I am and what I’m capable of. I also know I could never be capable of hurting you."
My pulse is in my ears. I can feel it in my fingertips, in the soft skin behind my knees, and at the hollow of my throat.
"You asked me tonight what I do for a living," he says. "I gave you the short answer. The long answer is that men like Jason Harrow are the reason the word monster exists. Men like me are the reason they're afraid of the dark. I'm not a good man. I'm not going to be a good man for you. But I will never, in this life or the next, touch you the way he touched you. I will never make you check your numbers twice. I will never make you question your own mind."
I press my tongue to the roof of my mouth to keep it steady.
"I'm telling you this because you said you don't want a man in your life, and I heard you. I understand. But I'm not offering you a man." His eyes don't move from mine. "I'm offering you something else. Something more."
I can't speak. My throat has closed around every word I know.
