The footsteps move away.
The pressure behind my eyes is enormous. I press my fingers to my mouth and breathe through it until it passes, and then I breathe through it once more just to be sure.
Somewhere in the back of my head, a voice tells me to lie down. I’m in no condition to move. But why? Why does it matter?
I have nothing left to give.
The car pulls up eleven minutes later. I watch the headlights sweep through the window, and I stand.
The morning air hits cold as I walk to the car, and I don’t look back at the windows. The driver doesn’t speak. The road unreels ahead, gray and straight.
I watch the estate disappear in the side mirror and just close my eyes.
I don’t know how long it takes, but the city comes up around the car gradually. Buildings replacing tree line, traffic thickening, the gray sky pressing lower.
I watch it through the window.
I used to do this thing on bad days where I’d run the numbers in my head. How much I owed. How many shifts it would take. How many months if I picked up overtime, if I skipped meals, if I gave up the apartment and found somewhere cheaper. I’d run them until they added up to something manageable or until I fell asleep trying. It was a miserable habit. But it was mine, and it kept me moving.
I try it now.
Nothing comes.
There are no numbers to run. No shift to pick up. No next step to calculate. I search for the part of me that always had a plan, even a bad one, and I find only quiet. Like a room where the furniture used to be.
The car stops, and I look up.
A glass-fronted building on a street that looks like money working hard to look clean. I stare at it through the window and wait for my body to do something. To tighten, to resist. I wait to feel the old sick dread that used to start in my stomach whenever I so much as got a call from one of Kozlov’s men.
Nothing.
I get out.
The doorman looks at my clothes and then my face. I see the moment he decides not to say anything, and I don’t feel relief, or embarrassment, or any of the things I would normally feel. I just walk past him.
Inside, a man in a dark jacket goes still the moment he sees me. I don’t look at him long enough to read his expression.
“I’m here to see Kozlov,” I say.
He looks at my face and then at the dried blood on my shirt.
“He’s expecting you?” He raises a brow.
“No. But I think he’ll want to see me.”
He pauses momentarily, and after one last dubious look at me, he lifts a radio to his mouth and turns away slightly. I stand and wait.
After a minute, he turns back and tells me to follow him, and I do. I watch my own feet move across the marble floor and think about how strange it is that your body keeps going. Even now. Even when the person inside it has stopped.
I think about my mother for a moment. The way she looked in the last weeks, how small she’d become in that hospital bed and how she’d still tried to smile every time I walked in. She fought so hard to stay. I wonder, briefly, what she’d think if she could see me now.
I let the thought go. It drifts away the way everything does when you stop holding on.
The doors open.
Kozlov is behind his desk, a paper bag open in front of him, eating with the ease of a man who has never had cause to be afraid of anything. He looks up when I walk in, and his eyes move over me slowly. The amusement that crosses his face is the particular kind that comes from feeling very comfortable, a man in his own territory looking at a problem that has walked itself through his door.
He doesn’t stand.
