Page 6 of Soft Erasure

She had been in them.

She had been wearing a small enamel pin in the shape of a key. The pin was the only thing about her that was not regulation.

“Who was that?” Matthew said when the door had closed behind us.

“I don’t know.”

He looked at the band. The band didn’t change.

“Ninety-five,” he said. “I believe you.”

He believed the number. He always believed the number. I wanted him to believe me without it.

The card in my palm was small and rectangular and the size of a business card. I knew this without looking. Something about the size of it made my hand close harder. I couldn’t have said what.

I kept my hand closed.

The SUV was at the curb. Black, tinted, a car that does not have a logo. It had been washed inside the last hour. The water beads at the seam of the door said so.

The driver turned when I opened the door, and the smile he gave me was a smile I knew.

Family, my body said, before the rest of me could catch up.

I got in the car. The locks engaged.

I noted what it felt like to be in a vehicle with no visible door release. It was the first observation that had surfaced without the band’s permission. I didn’t know if this was something I was supposed to notice. I noticed it anyway.

The card was still in my fist. I had carried it past the glass, past Cabot, past the man whose smile I knew, and no one had asked. I couldn’t have said why I hadn’t opened it.

I only knew the not-opening was the second thing that had surfaced without permission, and that no one in the car could see my hand.

The card was the easy secret.

The hard one had no edges and no name, and my fist could not hold it.

The man who had set two fingers on my wrist ten minutes ago was in the car, and the inside of my wrist still kept the place, and the place wanted them back. He was the reason I needed somewhere to hide my hand at all.

I kept my eyes on the door I couldn’t open from the inside anyway. It was the only direction left that didn’t lead back to him. The car was his to start and stop.

So was my pulse, and he already knew exactly how to do both.

CHAPTER TWO

The Drive

The car was moving before I’d finished sitting down.

Matthew, not Dr. Caldren. Not yet, and I already knew which one I’d rather keep. Caleb was driving.

“Hi, Amber.” He said it like a line he’d rehearsed and still didn’t believe.

His band was thin, older than mine, worn to a dull shine at the clasp, on a wrist I hadn’t thought to look at until now.

“This is Caleb. He’s going to be checking in on you the first weeks.”

Not a favor. An assignment, made the moment you acquire something and need its condition logged.

Caleb stared out the window, jaw locked, a man doing what he’d been told and hating himself for it.