My name.
He gets it out with no air at all, the way you'd say a word with a hand around your throat.
Nobody's said it.
Not one time.
The men who took me had a number for me and the women had a face.
My parents are dead and the only two mouths on this earth that ever made that sound are in the ground in Sierra Vista.
It comes out of him and my knees try something.
They try something and I shut it down.
He sees it. I watch him see it.
"Mila—" His fists close on the chain-link and he shakes it, the whole run jumping and rattling for thirty feet in both directions. "Mila. Where?—"
He stops.
He tries again. His mouth is doing something I've never seen a mouth do.
"You're—"
Nothing.
His hand comes off the gate and goes up toward me, stopping in the air between us. "Are you?—"
He can't. He physically can't.
There are a hundred things behind his teeth and not one of them will fit through, and what finally comes out of Finn Kincaid, after ten years, after every day of my life is, "Are you cold?"
Are you cold?
Heat comes up fast behind my eyes and it's moving before I can get in front of it, pressure building at the bridge of my nose, my throat going tight, and my chin does what it hasn't done since I was twenty-two years old.
One second.
He gets one second.
Then I put it back where it lives.
"Open the gate," I say.
His hands are already moving.
He fumbles with it.
He's got hands like a bricklayer and he can't work a gate latch. He gets it on the fourth try and hauls it back on the runner and it screams on the track.
Now there's nothing between us.
He doesn't come at me.
I had a plan for that. I had a whole plan for what my body does if he touches me, and I don't need it, because he takes one step and stops like he's hit glass.
His hands come up open at his sides.
