2. Three Ways In #3
Here's the other way, the grown-woman way.
Three strangers in a town nobody comes to, who probably ate when I wasn't looking and checked their phones the second I turned my back.
A woman three weeks deep in bad sleep, building monsters out of a slow week.
Because I'm not sixteen anymore. I don't get convinced.
I don't get bullied or handled, and I will not be lied to and used by anyone, ever again — not even by the part of my own head that wakes me at three in the morning and tries to sell me a threat that isn't there.
The dream fear is white cotton and Sister Agnes humming and the things I can't say out loud at three in the morning. It's supposed to stay in the bedroom. Tonight it followed me out here and put on three strangers' faces.
That's all this is. The dream got loose.
Then I think about the man in the gray t-shirt at the end of my bar tonight.
The duffel between his boots. The way he read the room.
The fact that he's sleeping at Eleanor Voss's in a town he had no reason to break down in.
The part of me that wanted to put him in the threat column the second he walked in — and the part that overruled it, because of a scar on the back of his hand.
I don't know what to do with that part either.
A small woman doing big work. My father said that to me the day we opened. I was twenty-two and dead on my feet, and he said it standing in the bar kitchen with his hands on his hips and that small smile. I think about it on the bad nights. I think about it now.
For eight years I built a fortress out of routine.
I hired Megan and Bo, learned every regular's drink and every loose floorboard, knew which door of this place locked from the inside and which window stuck.
I painted the sign with my own hands and hung it over the door.
The Devil's Daughter. Inside that fence they preached that loose women were found in bars, drinking the devil's juice, belonging to any man who'd have them.
So I built a bar. I poured the devil's juice with my own two hands and I hung their sermon over the door in red letters, a whole life away from the people who taught a girl she belonged to a man.
A woman who's still afraid of them doesn't do that.
I built everything I could build. Locks and routines and a whole loud life. And none of it touches the one place I could never wall off — the inside of my own head at three in the morning, where they still live rent-free, where I'm still sixteen and still theirs every single time I close my eyes.
That's the thing about a fortress. You can guard every door and still leave the one in your own skull standing wide open.
I told myself a lot of things, all these years.
That I had time. That a girl who runs far enough and builds high enough walls gets to stop being theirs.
That whoever was left inside that fence had surely forgotten the name of one runaway by now.
I told myself those things the way you tell a child there's nothing under the bed — not because it's true, but because it's the only thing that lets you turn off the light.
And standing here in the dark, I can't tell you whether tonight is the night one of those things stopped being true — or just the night a bad dream made me doubt all of them at once.
My hand was on the pistol before I was awake. I don't know if that's instinct, or the dream still holding on. At three in the morning I can't tell them apart.
I call my father.
He picks up on the first ring. He's been awake. He keeps the phone on his nightstand, face up, every night of his life — he's never once told me why, and I've never once asked.
"Kiddo."
"Dad."
"How bad?"
One word. He hears it in one word. Ten years of bad nights and it still gets me — I can't hide a thing from him, not even down a phone line at three in the morning.
"Bad." My voice catches, and I work to steady it.
"I'm on the porch in fifteen."
He doesn't ask what happened. He never does. He just comes.
The line goes dead.
I stand at the window with the phone still in my hand. Hours yet to first light, and my father will be on the porch before the dark even thins.
Probably for nothing. That's where I keep landing — a bad dream, a slow week, a woman three weeks deep in no sleep. I'll feel like a fool by sunrise. I always do.
But I can't shake the rest of it — that the dream took the worst thing I know, Brother Silas smiling at the end of my bar, and gave him the stranger's face.
That my own sleeping head can't sort the cowboy into a column any better than my waking one can.
Threat or not. Coming for me, or coming to me.
The dream couldn't tell either, and standing here in the dark, neither can I.
So I do the only thing that's ever worked. I wait at the window for my father's headlights, and I count my breaths, and I let the man who's never once asked me why come sit on my porch in the dark until the sixteen-year-old in me believes she's home.