It had also kept her alone in every room she had ever been in since.
I pressed the pen to the paper.
My signature came out the way my signature always came out — small, tight, the letters crammed close together. Sadie Voss. The ink was black and the paper was white and the space it filled was exactly the size of the space he’d left for it.
I sat back. My hand was still shaking slightly. He released it.
He took the pen from me. Not quickly. With the same care he had used to hold my hand, he picked it up out of my fingers and rotated the page a quarter turn and signed beneath my name. Dante Rowe. His signature was larger than mine, more assured, the loops clean and unhurried. He capped the pen. He set it down. He squared the page on the table with his fingertips, aligning it to the edge of the wood, and then he opened the folder beside him and took out a second copy — identical, already printed, waiting.
He slid it across.
“Yours,” he said.
I took it with both hands.
I folded it once, in half, and then once more, into quarters. The creases were sharp. My hands had stopped shaking. I got up from the table — my knees were not entirely cooperative, but they held — and crossed to the corner where my small canvas bag sat against the wall. I unzipped the front pocket and slid the folded page inside and zipped the pocket closed.
Then I stood.
The cabin was very quiet behind me. I could feel him at the table, still, watching without watching — attention on me but not pressing, not waiting for a next move, not needing me to do anything in particular.
I turned.
The bed was across the room. Four strides. I took them.
Clover was where I had left her against the pillow. I picked her up.
I did not tuck her into my shirt. I did not angle my body to hide her. I did not carry her down to the bed and wedge her under the covers, and I did not push her back into the shoebox under the frame. I picked her up and I stood there in the middle of the cabin, in broad daylight, with the morning light coming through the window at an angle, and I held her against my chest.
I looked up.
He was at the table. Hands folded again. Looking at me with the same level attention he had been paying me since the parking lot.
He didn’t speak. Didn’t smile in any way I could measure, didn’t nod, didn’t approve. He simply registered me standing in the middle of his cabin holding a one-pound stuffed rabbit in daylight, and he let the moment be exactly what it was without asking it to be more.
I held Clover for a long time.
Long enough that the muscles in my shoulders began to loosen. Long enough that the breath I hadn’t known I was holding let itself out in a quiet exhalation that I didn’t perform for him or for anyone. Long enough that the hinge in my chest completed one slow quarter-turn more.
I found my voice.
“Do you think it‘s strange?” I asked. “The way I am?”
It came out smaller than I had intended. Smaller than anything I had ever said to him. A voice I had not used in this cabin and maybe not in this decade, a voice that belonged to the six-year-old in the doorway, and I heard it and didn’t correct it.
He took his time before he answered.
“No,” he said. “I don’t think it’s strange.”
I waited.
“I think you’ve been carrying something alone for a very long time,” he said. “Longer than most people are asked to carry anything. And I think the fact that you‘ve carried it this well is the thing that makes you the person you are. But you don’t have to keep carrying it alone. That’s the only thing that‘s changing. The thing itself — the thing you’ve been holding — it gets to be held for a while. By both of us. Starting now.”
I held Clover tighter.
I didn’t cry. Crying was the thing I had stopped doing at eleven years old and the habit had outlasted every other habit I had tried to break. My eyes burned and my chest was tight and somewhere behind my sternum, something was unfolding that had been folded for so long that unfolding it hurt in places I hadn’t known could hurt.
But I didn’t cry.
