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Chapter 9

Zuri

I did not move.

The bed sagged beneath me, the brown spread thin and faintly damp, smelling of cigarettes and other people’s nights. Bathroom, he had said. Wash. As if it were an order. As if it were a kindness. I could not tell which.

So I watched him.

He had set the chair in the corner and turned it to face the door. Not me. A black roll neck stretched across shoulders so broad they swallowed the lamplight. He sat between me and the only exit, perfectly still, and I did the sum the way I would have done a titration. A jailer or a guard. From where I sat, the answer looked identical.

For three weeks I had read a man in text messages. Every word had been warm, and every word had been a lie. Now I had a man made of silence and no way to check him.

I tried anyway. Dark brown eyes that did not drift. A beard cut so cleanly it looked like a decision. The pale seam of the scar running into it, which my gaze kept sliding back to like a tongue to a chipped tooth. He blinked less than other people did. He did not smile. He did not reassure. He did nothing at all, and the nothing was worse than being shouted at.

I became aware of my body in pieces.

His coat sat across my shoulders, heavy and cold and smelling of smoke and rain. Beneath it, my dress hung in tatters. The hem was torn up to my thigh, and the fabric over my ribs had gone stiff with something I would not look at. My back burned where the gravel had flayed it, and every breath made the cloth stick and peel. My feet had left dark prints on the spread. I tucked them beneath me, hissed, and put them back.

My stomach cramped. My tongue felt like paper. The last thing I had eaten was a torn corner of Auntie’s chapati, stolen back from Brielle.

He stood.

Every muscle in my body locked. He crossed the room in three strides, and I watched his hands, big, steady, scarred across the knuckles. He did not come toward me. He went to the dresser, where a plastic sleeve of bottled water sat beside the television, and took one.

He set it on the nightstand, close enough for me to reach, and stepped back.

I picked it up. I turned it over twice. I pressed my thumbnail against the seal and then against the base, slowly, then again. I knew how stupid it was. The last bottle of water I had accepted had delivered me here.

He waited. He did not hurry me. He did not look away.

“It is sealed,” he said.

Two words. His voice was low and even, and it carried a cadence I could not place. Not Nairobi. Not Houston. Something clipped and southern, and very far from here. The seal cracked under my thumb. The water was cold. It was the best thing I had ever tasted.

My people, Auntie would have said. The same warm brown. The same continent in the bones, near enough to be a cousin. Adrián had been that too. The easy laugh, the familiar way he said my name, as though he had known me all my life. Auntie’s rules about whom to trust had always been about names and villages and mothers. None of them had covered a man who looked like home and smiled as if he had practised.

I lowered the bottle.

“Are you going to hurt me?”

“No.”

One word. I searched it for the lie, the way I had searched every message from Adrián, and I could not find one. That frightened me more than a lie would have.

I stood. My feet screamed. I clutched his coat closed and limped toward the narrow door at the back of the room, and he did not move his head. Only when I reached the threshold did he turn the chair, slowly, a quarter of the way, so that he faced the front door and not me.

“Lock it,” he said.

I stared at him. Adrián’s locks had clicked shut around me from the outside. This one, he was handing to me.

The bolt slid home with a small, ordinary sound, and for the first time since the car, I let myself breathe.

❦ ❦ ❦

The stench of the container was exchanged for sandalwood and cedar soap.

The water had been scalding, and I had stood beneath it with my forehead against the tiles until the grazes down my back stopped screaming and started to hum. The drain ran pink, then clear. Gravel I had not known was lodged in my palms loosened and swirled away. The towel was thin and scratchy and smelled faintly of bleach.