I stare at him.
"Do you understand me?" he asks.
I understand him. I understand what he's telling me and what he's not telling me, and the space between those two things is a place I'm going to have to learn to live in.
"Yes," I say, and goosebumps erupt over my arms, because I know the truth. I know what I did. I know what Nick did.
"Good." He presses his lips to my knuckles again, then lowers my hand back to the mattress. "Mikhail wants to check you over now that you're awake. Then I'm going to bring you somethingto eat. Then you're going to sleep in this bed until your body says it's done sleeping, and I'm going to be in this chair when you wake up."
I look at him in the lamplight. At the chair he's been sitting in for three days. At his hand still holding mine on the mattress.
"You stayed," I say. My eyes burn. I blink hard and look at the ceiling, because I'm not going to cry in front of him, even though the pressure in my chest is enormous and my throat aches with the weight of everything I can't say.
His thumb strokes across my knuckles. Small, steady circles. Patient.
"Rest, Sadie," he says. "I'm not going anywhere."
I close my eyes. His hand stays on mine. The monitor beeps in time with my pulse. Somewhere in this house that I don't know, in a room that isn't mine, in a bed I've never slept in, wrapped in sheets I could never afford, I feel something I haven't felt since my mother was alive.
I feel safe.
