“Because something is happening. In me. That I can’t — I don’t have a handle on it. I don’t know what it is. It doesn’t have edgesI can find. I had edges. I had a whole — a whole shape of myself, a thing I built, it took me a long time to build it, and in here” — I gestured at the cabin, at the scanner, at the bed, at nothing — “in here it’s getting soft. The edges. They’re blurring. I can feel them blurring. I drew a picture, Dante.”
He did not ask what picture.
“I drew a picture and I wrote two words underneath it and the words were — “
My throat closed. I swallowed. Opened it again.
“The words were things I have not said to anyone in my life. I wouldn’t have said them to myself. I wrote them down and then I scribbled them out and then I packed a bag because a woman who writes those words on a piece of paper in a cabin in the mountains is not a woman I recognize and I don’t — I can’t — “
I was crying.
Not the way a person cries. The way a person who has not cried in thirteen years starts to cry — which is not crying at all, which is just eyes going wet without any of the other machinery engaging, a pressure building behind the face that the face didn’t have the rigging to release. I blinked hard. The wetness stayed.
“I left because I was afraid of growing weak.”
I said it to the scanner. To the air between us. To the wooden floor.
“That’s the whole of it. I was afraid of growing weak. Every day in here I have been becoming something smaller and softer and more dependent and I can watch it happen and I cannot stop it and if I don’t leave now I won’t be able to leave later. The leaving muscle atrophies. I know it does. I’ve seen it in other women. I’ve seen it in every woman who stayed somewhere she shouldn’t have stayed. I’m not — I’m not going to be one of those women. I am not going to wake up in six months and find out I can’t move.”
My chest was heaving. I could hear it.
He hadn’t moved.
“Sadie.”
He said my name. Once. Quiet. Not a correction. Not an interruption. Just the name, placed in the air.
My eyes burned.
I looked at him.
He was in the chair. Hands loose between his knees. Face level, unreadable, giving back the same steady dark attention he had been giving me since the parking lot. He didn’t look angry. He didn’t look disappointed. He looked like a man who had heard what I said and was now, slowly, calibrating what to do with it.
“Come here,” he said.
I wiped my face with the heel of my hand. It came away wet and I stared at the wet on my palm like I didn’t know whose it was.
I stepped forward.
One step. Then another. My boots on the floorboards sounded too loud. I stopped in front of the chair, close enough that I could see the grey at his temples and the weave of his shirt and the small scar on his jaw I hadn’t catalogued yet.
“You’re not leaving,” he said. Still quiet. “You knew that before I got out of the truck. That’s why you stopped in the road.”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t.
“We have a contract,” he said. “It has rules in it, Sadie. There are rules for this.”
My eyes burned harder.
“I know,” I whispered.
“Rule nine,” he said.
I didn’t remember a rule nine.
“Consequence structure,” he said. “For broken rules. You signed it.”
My mouth was dry. “I didn’t break a rule.”
