I stare at him.
The sentence lands in me with complicated force — infuriating, and under the fury, a sensation I hate myself for, some treacherous warmth that responds to the wordsI want youregardless of the sentence they’re embedded in.
But I won’t fucking stand for it.
“That’s—” I stop. The realization dawns: this isn’t a conversation he’s going to have with me right now, or possibly ever. Not in the terms I’m demanding it in. The wall is up.
I turn toward the door.
“Go back to our room,” he orders, as if I wasn’t clearly leaving already.
Our room.The phrase twists my face as I leave.
“No.” I don’t stop walking. “When you’re ready to tell me the truth — the whole truth — you know where to find me.”
“Elizabeth.”
I don’t stop.
“You won’t win this,” he sternly explains. “You’ll stay with me, and that is not something you get to negotiate.”
We’ll see,I think.
Then I walk out.
29
ELLIE
I’m pissed.
I let myself feel it clearly, which I don’t always do. I tend to sand the edges off anger before I’ve finished feeling it, to forgive too fast.
Not tonight. Tonight, I curl in my bed in my room and let the rage seep from my pores.
He let me walk into this house, sign a contract, settle into a routine, start to care about his daughter, and sleep in his bed and think…Damn it… think that we were building toward something. That’s what my heart thought. And the whole time,this.This is what was underneath.
And when I finally asked, when I stood in his office and demanded the basic human courtesy of an explanation, he looked at me like I wasn’t worth the answer.
You’ll stay because I want you to stay.
I don’t sleep.
My body is running on whatever fuel anxiety produces when it’s been burning for six hours straight, and my mind is processing too much to stop.
The darkness in my room feels different tonight. Heavier.
The house is quiet, and a strange feeling of being watched comes over me. I turn over in bed, and my breath catches.
The door is partly open.
He’s in the corridor.
Behind him, a subtle wash of moonlight shapes his looming silhouette.
My heart twitches, flutters, then drops into stillness.
I sit up slowly. “Rolan?”
