Page 22

I just stay, listening to her breathe, watching the faint light from the hallway cut a thin line across the ceiling, and for once in longer than I can remember, my mind stays exactly where my body is.

14

HARPER

It happens again the next night, and the next, until I stop keeping track of which night is which and start marking the pattern instead.

He comes by after the house goes quiet, usually close to midnight, always with some thin excuse in the first thirty seconds that neither of us bothers pretending is the real reason he’s there.

A question about how my day went. Something about the guard rotation. Once, memorably, he claimed he wanted to know if I’d finished the book I’d been reading, and I laughed so hard at the transparency of it that he actually looked briefly wounded before he laughed too.

The excuses get thinner as the days go on, until eventually they stop altogether and he just knocks, and I just open the door, and neither of us bothers pretending there’s a reason beyond the obvious one anymore.

It’s a strange kind of comfort, watching him drop the pretense a little more each night, like some careful wall in him is coming down one brick at a time, whether he means for it to or not.

Neither of us calls it anything. Neither of us needs to. It’s just become a fact of how my days end now, the way breakfast happens, or the guard changes shift, except this fact makes my pulse do something breakfast never has.

I still mark the days on the inside of my closet door. That hasn’t stopped, and I make a point of keeping it up even now, some part of me refusing to let one part of my life bleed into erasing the rest of it.

Seven weeks yesterday. Seven weeks since a supervisor’s mix-up turned into a life I never agreed to, and no amount of what happens after midnight changes the fact that I didn’t choose the front half of any of this.

That resentment surfaces sharpest in the daylight hours, when it isn’t tangled up with anything else.

I ask Marek, mostly out of habit at this point, whether there’s been any update on when I might actually be allowed to leave the property unescorted, and he gives me the same careful non-answer he always gives, deferring to Artem the way everyone in this house eventually defers to Artem.

I clean up after myself in the kitchen unprompted one afternoon, old muscle memory kicking in, and catch myself furious a full minute later that I’m still performing usefulness in a house I never agreed to live in.

It’s a small, stupid thing to be angry about, wiping down a counter, and I’m angry about it because the anger’s never really about the counter. It’s about the fact that some habits from my old life have survived transplanting into this one intact, while the rest of that life has mostly just fallen away.

I bring it up to Artem directly, one afternoon in the study, more out of principle at this point than any real expectation he’ll change his answer. “You know this doesn’t cancel out anything, right? Whatever’s happening at night. I still want out of here.”

“I know.” He doesn’t look up from whatever he’s reading, unbothered in the way that used to infuriate me and now mostly just makes me want to throw something at him. “I never assumed otherwise.”

“Good. Just checking we’re on the same page.”

“We are.” Now he does look up, something almost amused in his expression. “Doesn’t mean I’m walking you to the gate anytime soon.”

“Didn’t think so.” I fold my arms and lean against the doorframe, refusing to let the conversation end on his terms alone. “I just need you to know I haven’t forgotten what this actually is. Whatever’s happening between us at night doesn’t erase the fact that I’m still here because you won’t let me leave.”

“I’ve never once forgotten that either.” His voice loses some of its usual ease, something more careful in it right now. “I’m not confused about what this is, Harper. I know exactly what I’m asking of you and exactly what I’m not giving you in return.”

That honesty catches me off guard. I don’t have anything ready to say back to it, so I nod once and let the silence sit there between us, heavier than either of us seems willing to break first, both fully aware of what we’ve just admitted out loud.

I want to leave. I also don’t spend my nights fighting him off, and some nights I’m the one who doesn’t let him leave when he tries to.

Wanting my freedom and wanting him aren’t supposed to fit in the same body at the same time, and yet here I am, proving they do, whether it makes sense or not.

I’ve tried explaining it to myself a dozen different ways, lying awake after he’s gone, and none of the explanations ever fully hold.

Maybe it’s simpler than I’m making it. Maybe a person can want two contradictory things at once and just have to live inside that contradiction instead of resolving it.

Maybe I’m giving myself too much credit for having it figured out at all, when really I’m just a person doing the best she can with a situation nobody would know how to navigate cleanly.

Tonight, he shows up later than usual, past one, and doesn’t bother with an excuse at all this time, just leans against my doorframe like he’s been debating whether to knock for a while.

There’s something different about him tonight too, a looseness in his shoulders that isn’t usually there.

“Bad excuse tonight?” I ask, already smiling before I mean to.