My knees pressed against the cold tile, my hands clasped behind my back in the exact position Gabriel had trained me to hold. Back straight. Head bowed. Waiting.
I didn't remember getting into this position. Didn't remember making the choice to kneel. One moment I'd been standing at the sink, and the next—
The rag fell from my hand. I stared at my reflection in the polished oven door—a woman on herknees, her eyes wide with a fear she couldn't name, her body arranged in a posture of submission she'd sworn she'd left behind.
"Get up," I whispered. "Get up, get up, get up."
But I couldn't move. My muscles had locked into place, conditioned by years of training that no amount of healing had erased. I was frozen there, kneeling on Nathan's kitchen floor, my body performing a ritual my mind didn't remember learning.
You call for Daddy in your sleep.
Gabriel's voice from the nightmare echoed in my head, and I squeezed my eyes shut. This wasn't real. This was just a flashback. A trauma response. Nathan had said—
Nathan.
I forced my eyes open. Forced my hands to unclasp from behind my back. The movement felt like tearing through spiderwebs, each thread of conditioning snapping one by one until I could finally push myself to my feet.
The kitchen was still clean. The apartment was still quiet. Nothing had changed except me.
I pressed my palms against the counter and focused on breathing. In through the nose, hold for four, out through the mouth. The technique Nathan had taught me. The technique that was supposed to ground me in the present when the past tried to pull me under.
It worked, barely. The panic receded from a scream to a whisper. My hands stopped shaking enough that I could pour myself a glass of water.
I should tell Nathan about this, I thought. He'd want to know. He'd have some explanation—a trauma trigger, a buried memory surfacing, a normal part of the healing process.
But I didn't want to tell him. Didn't want to see the concern in his eyes, the careful way he'd frame his questions, the clinical distance that sometimes crept into his voice when he talked about my "progress." I didn't want to be a patient anymore. I wanted to be his partner.
So I finished my water, and I finished cleaning the kitchen, and I didn't kneel again.
The afternoon dragged. Nathan was still at his meeting, and the apartment felt too quiet without him. I tried reading—one of the psychology books he'd recommended, something about trauma recovery and neural plasticity—but the words blurred together on the page. I tried watching television, but the cheerful voices of the cooking show host grated against my nerves.
Finally, I did what I always did when the silence became unbearable: I went to the bar.
The Lost Hours was quiet on weekday afternoons, just a few regulars nursing beers and the jukebox playing something sad and country. Matt was behind the counter,polishing glasses with the same methodical patience he brought to everything.
"Didn't expect to see you today," he said. "Everything okay?"
"Fine." I slid onto my usual stool. "Just needed to get out of the apartment."
He studied me for a moment, then poured a club soda with lime and set it in front of me. He'd never served me alcohol during the day—an unspoken rule I appreciated. "You've got that look again."
"What look?"
"The one that says you're thinking too hard about something you don't want to talk about."
I traced the rim of my glass with one finger. "Do you ever do things you can't explain? Like your body is moving without your permission?"
"All the time. Called getting old."
"I'm serious."
He set down the glass he'd been polishing and leaned against the bar. "You talking about the training? The stuff Gabriel did?"
"Maybe." I didn't want to say more, but Matt had earned the right to my honesty. He'd seen me at my worst—blood-spattered and manic, hunting predators through the city's underbelly—and he'd never flinched. "I did something this morning. Something I didn't mean to do. And I don't know why."
"What kind of something?"
"I knelt." The words felt like a confession. "On the kitchen floor. In this specific position that he used to make me hold. And I didn't even realize I was doing it until it was already done."
