22. The Future He Took From Me
The Future He Took From Me
Summer
Jackson has been holding me for over an hour.
His forehead rests against mine, and I let it. I sit frozen at his side while the dampness of his tears cools on my skin, and I don't pull away, because somewhere in the last hour I decided I wasn't going to. That's the game now. It's the only one I have left.
He's using me to heal something. Somewhere in the wreckage of him he believes he can pour a dead woman back into a living body, and over the last hour he's lost the seam entirely—lost where I stop and she starts.
His hand stays tangled in my hair, fingers tightening every few seconds like he's afraid I'll dissolve if he loosens his grip.
I let him think it.
The room has gone thick and warm, heavy with his cologne and the perfume he sprayed onto my throat—her scent—and every part of me it touches feels like it belongs to someone else.
Nothing about me is mine anymore. Not my hair.
Not my skin. Not even the name he keeps not saying, because in his head he's already painted over it.
So when his thumb strokes across my cheek, I don't flinch. Every nerve I have screams at me to tear out of his hands and put a wall between us, and I hold every one of them down, and I stay soft, and I stay still.
Because I am learning, one horrifying inch at a time, exactly what he wants.
He draws his head back, and his bloodshot eyes find mine. Something in his face loosens—his shoulders come down a fraction—and I understand that my stillness did that.
It sends the nausea climbing higher in my throat. But underneath the revulsion, cold and clear, is the thing I've decided matters more than my disgust.
Information. If I'm getting out of this house alive, I need to understand what I'm standing in the middle of. And all I have so far is the hair color of a dead woman, and a man who weeps into it.
I make my voice gentle. Careful. The voice of the woman he wants me to be.
"Who was she?"
I'm sure he won't answer, but eventually, his eyes move over mine and I feel myself being weighed—whether the question is curiosity or a crack I'm trying to widen.
"Annalise." Just the name, quiet, like it's something he doesn't hand out often. "Her name was Annalise."
Of course, I already knew that. After all, it was her name he grunted when he finished inside of me not too long ago. The back of my nose down to my throat burns with the memory and I feel a sob working its way, but I won’t allow it to surface. I can’t.
"I'm sorry you lost her." Somehow my words manage to surface evenly, and the strange thing is that under the performance, some small true part of me means it.
He tips his head, considering me. Then, softer: "She was everything."
Everything. As if that explains any of it.
As if it explains why I'm sitting here in a dead woman's perfume while a murderer strokes my throat as though it’s love.
He doesn't seem to understand that I know exactly what that word means—that it's the word I'd use for Jacob—and that he's trying to lift it out of both of us and pour it into a grave.
"What happened to her?"
The temperature in the room drops. I feel it move over my skin before I see it settle in him.
"She died." Flat. Final. A door swinging shut.
I wait for more. It doesn't come. And I understand, in that silence, that this is how it's going to be with him—a name and a wound and then nothing, every scrap of the truth something he'll make me reach for and mostly come back empty-handed.
He isn't grieving out loud for my benefit.
He's letting me watch him grieve while he keeps the rest locked somewhere I'll never reach.
But I don't need him to say the words. I already know.
I knew the second he pulled the photograph from the box.
She was in the footage—the woman with the exhaustion sitting so deep in her eyes she looked like she was disappearing before anyone finished the job.
The one who was always just an arm's length from my father.
There's another question that's been sitting behind my teeth since the moment I understood what he wants to make of me—the one thread in all of this that refuses to lie flat.
It's dangerous. But he's cracked open right now, as close to reachable as he is ever going to be, and I might not get another moment like this one.
I test the edge of it the way you'd move around a sleeping animal. I keep my body soft against his. I keep my voice small.
"Before Jacob took me," I say, "there was a listing.
On the dark web. Me—my face, my name. Listed for—" My pulse jumps under his hand, and I don’t continue that sentence, instead I force myself go on, but from a different angle.
"If I was always meant to be her... why put me up to be used and thrown away? "
His hand goes still on my throat.
Something turns over behind his eyes—the cold machine under the grief, waking—and for one horrible second I'm certain I've cut too deep, too soon.
Then he smiles. And it's worse than any answer, because it's almost pleased.
"That was never about you." His thumb starts its slow stroke again, unhurried, and the calm of it lifts every hair on my body. "That was a message. And your father read it exactly the way I meant him to."
I wait, barely breathing, for him to say more.
He doesn't. He just watches me want it.
"When that parasite wouldn’t back away from her, I made it clear I could take his little girl and drag her into my world," he says softly, "I never had time to remove the listing before—"
He stops then. Shakes his head and that's all I get.
The rest of what I wanted to know sealed up behind that patient, terrible smile—and somehow the not-knowing sits heavier than the whole story would have, because it tells me exactly how far his control is meant to reach.
Even this. Even how much of my own life I'm allowed to understand.
His fingers curl at the base of my skull, drawing my face a fraction closer.
His gaze travels over my face, slow, cataloguing every feature—my mouth, my eyes, the dark hair he arranged over my shoulder—the way he looks at me isn't the way you look at a person. It's the way you look at something you're partway through making.
"You're mine now," he says. "You understand that."
I don't answer. I can't. The performance is fraying at the edges and I'm holding it together with everything I have left.
"And when the sheriff comes for you"—he says it lightly, a remark about the weather—"I'll bury him in my back yard."
That's the word that does it. Sheriff. The mask I've held together for an hour tears clean down the middle, because there is no version of her I can play through the image of Jacob in the ground behind this house.
"You're insane." My voice cracks. I wrench back out of his hands and shove myself up off the bed. "You're fucking insane."
I make it three steps before my stomach turns over completely and I have to bring my hand up to my mouth to stop myself vomiting right there and then. I rush sideways, shouldering into the wall before eventually hitting my knees at the toilet and bring up everything left in me.
He follows, unhurried. I hear him lower himself down beside me, pulling my hair back.
"You think this is insanity." Not a question.
Quiet, almost kind, which is the most frightening thing about him.
"Insanity is a man believing he can take the love of my life.
" His hand settles at the back of my neck, gentle.
"The Miller bloodline ends with me. You will learn to be what I want you to be. "
I heave again.
"Which reminds me." He says, conversational. Almost fond. "I felt that little device inside you. It needs to come out, princess."
My IUD.
No. No, no, no.
And all at once I understand the full size of what he means to do.
He doesn't want to keep me. He wants to consume me—every hour, every choice, every cell—until there's nothing left in me he didn't put there himself.
No future. No child that isn't his. No door that isn't locked from the outside.
My friends will grow old without me while I rot in this house, being carved, one piece at a time, into a dead woman.
He turns me gently by the chin until I have to look at him.
"You'll give me the future he took from me." He almost sings.
"And what if I don't?" My pulse slams so hard it hurts. "What if I'd rather fucking die?"
He studies me in silence for a long moment. Then he leans in and presses his mouth to my forehead, gentle as a blessing.
"You will do as you’re told." He tells me.
Something in me comes loose. I surge up off the floor swinging, and my fist glances off the hand he lifts to shield himself—my already-broken fingers grinding back out of place—but I'm so numb, so wrung out on adrenaline, that I barely feel it land.
He shoves me and I go sprawling back into the bathroom door.
I push myself off it, and manage to find my bearings. Then, I run.
I don't stop. I scramble across the room to the window, the one that cracks its useless two inches, and I put my mouth to the gap and scream the only name that has ever meant safe.
"JACOB!"
Then something slams into the back of my head, and the world drops out from under me into nothing.