I shift in the chair. The plastic is cold through my jeans and the chill has settled into my lower back in a way that's going to make standing difficult if I get the chance. My left knee aches, the minor injury from the wreck that has lingered, and I can feel the stiffness locking up the joint.
I think about Dr. Mehta.
She's probably at the clinic right now, standing in her office with her arms folded and her jaw set, the expression she wears when something has gone wrong with a patient and she is deciding, rapidly and completely, what needs to happen next. She wore that expression when she sat me down in her office three months ago and asked me, in a voice so careful it almost broke me, whether the wrist fracture was really from a fall.
She got me out of Millbrook. She got me the job. She wrote me the prescription I was too ashamed to ask for and never once made me feel small for needing it. Mehta doesn't miss things. Mehta is the reason I'm alive twice over, and the thought of her standing in that office right now, knowing I'm gone again, makes something sharp twist behind my ribs.
The drip falls. I count. Eleven seconds. Another.
I think about nursing school.
It seems absurd to think about it here, tied to a chair in a windowless room, but my brain reaches for it anyway the way a hand reaches for a railing in the dark. The application is sittingon the kitchen counter at Nick's house. I was going to fill it out tonight.
I wanted that life. I still want it. The quiet, ordinary machinery of it. Classes. Clinical rotations. The weight of a stethoscope around my neck that belongs to me, that I earned, that says I finished what I started before my mother got sick and everything fell apart.
I wanted all of it. Marriage. Kids. A house with a backyard and a kitchen big enough to cook in properly. I used to lie in bed in Millbrook, Jason breathing heavily beside me, and build it in my head like a floor plan. Two bedrooms. Maybe three. A dog. A garden with tomatoes because my mother grew tomatoes and the smell of the vine is the closest thing I have to her.
That was before.
Before a sedan crumpled on a freeway and a man with grey eyes grabbed my jaw and didn't let go. Before I learned what it means to be touched by someone who pays attention.
The life I imagined in Millbrook and the life I'm living now are so far apart they might as well belong to different women. The woman who wanted tomatoes and a dog would not recognize the woman sitting in this chair. She wouldn't recognize a woman who sleeps beside a man with a gun in his nightstand and tattoos that tell stories she's learning to read. She wouldn't recognize a woman who wakes up every morning in a house where men speak Russian in the hallway and the front door has three locks and the man she loves says "always" when she tells him to be careful.
She definitely wouldn't recognize a woman who killed a man with a cheap serrated knife and felt nothing.
I think about Jason.
I don't want to, but the room is quiet and my brain has run out of safe places to go, and so there he is. Slumped on my kitchen floor with his chin on his chest. His hands sliding through the blood on his shirt, the blood that was almost black because I hit the liver, and I knew I hit the liver because I'm a medical assistant who has studied anatomy and I saw the color and I knew, and I didn't call 911.
I couldn't have called 911. That's what I tell myself. My sugar was crashing. I could barely move. My phone was in my purse across the room and my body was shutting down and there was nothing I could have done even if I'd wanted to.
But the truth, the thing I've been circling for weeks without landing on, is that I'm not sure I wanted to.
He messed with my insulin. He turned the dial on my pen and put it back in the fridge and walked out whistling, knowing what it would do to me. Knowing I could die. He did it more than once. And when I was on the floor of my apartment with my sugar plummeting and my head bleeding from where he slammed it into the wall, he told me I was fine. He stood at the sink washing my scratches off his arm while I had a seizure on the linoleum, and he told me to calm down.
The knife was in my hand because my hand needed something to hold. That's what I told myself then, and it's what I tell myself now. It might even be true. But the part that comes after, the part where I watched him bleed and didn't move, the part where I could hear him asking me to call someone and I didn't, that part isn't about a hand reaching for a railing.
That part is a choice I made. And I don't feel much about it.
I've tried. In the quiet hours at Nick's house, in the shower, in the minutes before sleep when the day strips itself down to what's left, I've searched for the guilt. I've looked for the horror, the revulsion, the crushing weight that should come withknowing you took a life. I've found nothing. A flatness where the feeling should be, like pressing on a bruise that's already healed.
Nick told me he was a monster. He said it on the sidewalk outside my old apartment, under a buzzing streetlight, with his knuckles against my jaw. He said it like a confession and a warning rolled into one, and I looked at him and I wasn't afraid.
I wonder if that's because I recognized him.
The drip falls. Eleven seconds. I count. The rhythm holds me.
Somewhere on the other side of that locked door, men are making decisions about my life in a language I don't speak, for reasons that have nothing to do with me and everything to do with the man I love.
I used to be a woman who helped strangers in car wrecks and put puppy band-aids on frightened children. I still am. I'm also a woman who killed a man in her kitchen and sleeps soundly beside another man who kills for a living. I am both of those women at the same time, and if I make it out of this room, I'm going to have to figure out how to live in the space between them.
If I make it out.
The thought arrives and I let it. I don't flinch from it. I hold it the way I hold a bad reading on my meter, with a clear head and the understanding that denial is a luxury I've never been able to afford.
I might not make it out.
My insulin is in a bag on the pavement. My body is a clock that has already started counting down. The men who took me don't know what Type 1 means, or if they do, they don't care. Either way, the result is the same. The water bottle on the table might buy me a few hours of hydration, but it won't stop the chemistry. Nothing stops the chemistry except the thing I don't have.
