“Okay,” I said.
I shoved it under the bed. Hard. The same motion, the same heel, the same push. It hit the cabin wall and stopped.
I got back in bed. Pulled the covers up. Turned to face the wall.
Behind me, his typing resumed. Steady. Unhurried.
Under the bed, Clover sat in her box in the dark, and I lay above her and breathed and did not cry, because I don’t cry, because crying was a thing I’d stopped doing at eleven years old when I figured out that nobody comes when you do it and the only thing it costs you is a night’s sleep.
I pressed my face into the pillow and held very still and felt the shape of something I couldn’t name pressing against the inside of my ribs, like a hand trying to open a locked door.
***
He left at nine. Camera retrieval on the far side of town — he said it like he was reading a schedule, already pulling on his jacket, already reaching for the keys. Two hours, maybe more. The truck started. The gravel crunched. The sound of the engine thinned and thinned and then there was nothing.
I sat at the table. Stared at the wall.
Ten minutes.
I lasted ten minutes, sitting with my hands flat on the table, back straight, feet on the floor. Being the person I’d built. The capable one, the efficient one, the one who made tabs from card stock and fixed shutters with electrical tape and never sat down when there was a surface to wipe or a system to improve.
Then I got up and knelt beside the bed.
My hand found the box, and the lid came off, and everything inside was exactly where I’d left it.
The photos were on top. Two of them, both small, both faded. I didn’t look at them now — their contents were memorized, burned in. The report cards. Three, from different schools, different years, different names on the teacher line. A- in math, every time. The birthday card. Blue, with a cartoon cake on the front. And, at the bottom of the box, where she’d been sitting for months in the dark…
Clover.
I lifted her out. Her fur was grey where it had been white, rubbed flat in places, matted in others. The seam in her belly was pulling apart — I could see the stuffing through the gap, a tuft of it, white and tired. Her one remaining eye — black button, the thread frayed nearly through — hung slightly crooked on the left side of her face, giving her the permanent expression of someone who’d seen a lot and was choosing to be cheerful about it anyway.
I held her against my chest.
My shoulders dropped. My breathing changed. Slowed. Deepened. The tight, measured rhythm of Sadie-who-runs-columns became something else — something softer, something younger, something that lived in the body rather than the brain.
My back found the mattress edge and I curled against it, knees drawing up, Clover tucked between my chin and my collarbone. She fit there. She‘d always fit there, in the space a child makes when she pulls everything in and tries to become small enough that the world might overlook her, or hold her, depending on which kind of world it turned out to be.
My thumb found my mouth.
I didn’t think about it. The thought would have killed it — would have brought the other Sadie rushing back. So I didn’t think. I just let it happen. The pad of my thumb against my lower lip, the gentle pressure, the closing of my eyes. The rocking started on its own, a slow lateral motion, side to side, the kind that soothes without needing to be told what it’s soothing.
Outside, the pines moved. I could hear them through the glass — the soft shush of branches, the creak of trunks leaning in the wind. Sounds that were old and patient and had nothing to do with bar shifts or adding machines or the Diablos or Pitt’s hand on my wrist. Sounds that were just the mountain, being the mountain, the way it had been doing for longer than anyone alive could count.
I rocked. The floor was hard under me and the bed was soft behind me and Clover was warm against my chest and my thumb was in my mouth and I was —
I was nowhere I could name. Not the cabin, not Harlan Creek. Somewhere before all of that. Somewhere underneath. The place where the girl lived who’d never been given the thing she needed most, and had built an entire life out of not needing it.
Time dissolved. The vigilance was gone. For the first time since — I couldn’t say since when. Since before the counting started. I wasn’t scared anymore. I wasn’t bracing.
I just was.
I didn’t hear the truck.
Didn‘t hear the gravel. Didn’t hear the boots on the porch or the door opening or the particular sound of a large man stepping into a small room and stopping. Until I did.
I looked up.
Dante stood at the threshold. One hand on the door frame. His jacket still on, keys still in his other hand.
