"And?"
"And I went past them."
Nobody moves.
"I could've opened those doors. The keys were in a desk forty feet from where I stood and there were four men and a truck two miles west. I put my hand on a door, and I counted it out, and I went past them."
"Ms. Bacani?—"
"I told them I'd come back." My voice has gone somewhere I can't reach and I don't stop it. "There's a girl at the eighth door on the left who came in a few months before I got out and cried for a week. I never said one word to her. Not one, in all those months, because words get you watched. And she had her hands in the slot, and she was screaming at me to take her, and I put my palm on that door, and I told her I'd come back and Ileft."
The room's silent.
"So that's the rest," I say. "I need three things and the third one's the only one I care about, and I'll say the other two again if you want, but you already know them."
Amara doesn't answer.
Behind me the door opens.
The woman has a baby on her hip.
She's maybe twenty-seven, with a six-month-old on her hip and a burp cloth over her shoulder.
She's saying something back over it to Dante as she comes through, and she's laughing at whatever he said to her in the hall.
Then she sees the room.
She stops in the doorway.
Her eyes go around it and I watch them go—Amara on her feet, Razor forward with his hand still at his mouth, Finn against the wall with his face destroyed, me on the couch.
The laugh goes out of her.
Her hand comes up and flattens on the back of the baby's head.
She doesn't think about it. It isn't a decision.
I've seen women do that in a hallway with nothing in their arms. I've done it myself with nothing in mine.
Every drop of blood in me goes to my face at once, hot, all of it, and there's water coming up behind my eyes so fast I have to look at the desk.
"Prez?" she says.
"Lashes." Amara's voice comes out somewhere I haven't heard it. Slow. "This is Camila. She came in this morning."
Lashes looks at me.
My face doesn't do anything.
It stopped somewhere around year four and it never came back, and Marie used to watch me across her kitchen table with her mouth pressed shut and I know exactly what she was seeing.
But Lashes isn't looking at my face.
She's looking at my hands. My shoulders. Where my feet are and how far they are from the door.
Her arm tightens on the baby.
"Okay," she says.
