Sadie
I count the drips.
There's a pipe in the corner of the ceiling, rusted where it meets the wall, and every eleven seconds a bead of water gathers at the joint and falls to the concrete below. I've been counting long enough to know the interval. Eleven seconds. Consistent. The only reliable thing in this room.
My wrists are zip-tied behind the chair I was unceremoniously dumped in.
My ankles are bound to the legs with something thicker, maybe cord.
The tape over my mouth was removed an hour ago, or what I think was an hour ago, by a man who opened the door, looked at me, and pulled it off without speaking.
He left a bottle of water on the table against the far wall.
He didn't untie my hands so I could drink it.
The water sits there. I can see the condensation on the plastic, the small beads sliding down the side. My mouth is so dry that my tongue feels like a foreign object.
I try to flex my fingers behind the chair.
The zip tie bites and my hands have gone past pins and needles into something deeper, a numbness that worries the clinical part of my brain.
The part that never shuts off, even now.
Especially now. Reduced circulation. If the tie is tight enough to compress the radial artery, I could lose function in my fingers within hours.
I stop testing it. Conserve energy. Think.
I breathe the way I breathe when my sugar drops. Four seconds in. Six seconds out. The rhythm is the only tool I have, and I hold onto it the way I held onto Nick's voice the last time I was on a floor with the world going dark.
Nick.
I let myself think about him for exactly ten seconds. His hand on the back of my neck in the morning. The weight of his arm across my waist at three a.m. when he shifts in his sleep and pulls me closer without waking up.
Ten seconds. That's all I give myself because anything more and the panic will find a way in, and I can't afford panic right now. Panic burns glucose. Panic is a luxury for people whose bodies don't betray them on a cellular level.
I don't know what time it is. They took my watch. My phone is in my bag, and my bag is on the asphalt outside the staff entrance at the clinic, along with my insulin pen, my meter, my glucose tabs... I’m hoping one of them will have found it by now.
She knows I don't go anywhere without my kit.
She'll have told Dr. Mehta, and Dr. Mehta will have called Nick, and Nick will already be doing whatever it is that Nick does when the world takes something from him.
Two weeks ago it was Jason, and I told myself Nick would come. I was right.
The difference is that last time, I didn't know how long I had. This time I do. I had my morning dose at breakfast. Toast and peanut butter and juice at the island while Nick read something on his phone and Dmitri waited in the hall. My long-acting insulin is good for roughly twenty-four hours.
I know the math the way I know my own name.
I've known it since I was nine years old, sitting in Dr. Patterson's office in Millbrook while my mother held my hand and the doctor explained, in the careful voice adults use when they're delivering permanent news to a child, that my pancreas had stopped working and was never going to work again.
My mother cried in the car afterward. I didn't. I was thinking about the numbers. I liked that there were numbers. Numbers made sense. Numbers could be managed.
Numbers are all I have right now.
I shift in the chair. The plastic is cold through my jeans and the chill has settled into my lower back in a way that's going to make standing difficult if I get the chance. My left knee aches, the minor injury from the wreck that has lingered, and I can feel the stiffness locking up the joint.
I think about Dr. Mehta.
She's probably at the clinic right now, standing in her office with her arms folded and her jaw set, the expression she wears when something has gone wrong with a patient and she is deciding, rapidly and completely, what needs to happen next.
She wore that expression when she sat me down in her office three months ago and asked me, in a voice so careful it almost broke me, whether the wrist fracture was really from a fall.
She got me out of Millbrook. She got me the job.
She wrote me the prescription I was too ashamed to ask for and never once made me feel small for needing it.
Mehta doesn't miss things. Mehta is the reason I'm alive twice over, and the thought of her standing in that office right now, knowing I'm gone again, makes something sharp twist behind my ribs.
The drip falls. I count. Eleven seconds. Another.
I think about nursing school.
It seems absurd to think about it here, tied to a chair in a windowless room, but my brain reaches for it anyway the way a hand reaches for a railing in the dark. The application is sitting on the kitchen counter at Nick's house. I was going to fill it out tonight.
I wanted that life. I still want it. The quiet, ordinary machinery of it. Classes. Clinical rotations. The weight of a stethoscope around my neck that belongs to me, that I earned, that says I finished what I started before my mother got sick and everything fell apart.
I wanted all of it. Marriage. Kids. A house with a backyard and a kitchen big enough to cook in properly.
I used to lie in bed in Millbrook, Jason breathing heavily beside me, and build it in my head like a floor plan.
Two bedrooms. Maybe three. A dog. A garden with tomatoes because my mother grew tomatoes and the smell of the vine is the closest thing I have to her.
That was before.
Before a sedan crumpled on a freeway and a man with grey eyes grabbed my jaw and didn't let go. Before I learned what it means to be touched by someone who pays attention.
The life I imagined in Millbrook and the life I'm living now are so far apart they might as well belong to different women.
The woman who wanted tomatoes and a dog would not recognize the woman sitting in this chair.
She wouldn't recognize a woman who sleeps beside a man with a gun in his nightstand and tattoos that tell stories she's learning to read.
She wouldn't recognize a woman who wakes up every morning in a house where men speak Russian in the hallway and the front door has three locks and the man she loves says "always" when she tells him to be careful.
She definitely wouldn't recognize a woman who killed a man with a cheap serrated knife and felt nothing.
I think about Jason.
I don't want to, but the room is quiet and my brain has run out of safe places to go, and so there he is.
Slumped on my kitchen floor with his chin on his chest. His hands sliding through the blood on his shirt, the blood that was almost black because I hit the liver, and I knew I hit the liver because I'm a medical assistant who has studied anatomy and I saw the color and I knew, and I didn't call 911.
I couldn't have called 911. That's what I tell myself. My sugar was crashing. I could barely move. My phone was in my purse across the room and my body was shutting down and there was nothing I could have done even if I'd wanted to.
But the truth, the thing I've been circling for weeks without landing on, is that I'm not sure I wanted to.
He messed with my insulin. He turned the dial on my pen and put it back in the fridge and walked out whistling, knowing what it would do to me.
Knowing I could die. He did it more than once.
And when I was on the floor of my apartment with my sugar plummeting and my head bleeding from where he slammed it into the wall, he told me I was fine.
He stood at the sink washing my scratches off his arm while I had a seizure on the linoleum, and he told me to calm down.
The knife was in my hand because my hand needed something to hold.
That's what I told myself then, and it's what I tell myself now.
It might even be true. But the part that comes after, the part where I watched him bleed and didn't move, the part where I could hear him asking me to call someone and I didn't, that part isn't about a hand reaching for a railing.
That part is a choice I made. And I don't feel much about it.
I've tried. In the quiet hours at Nick's house, in the shower, in the minutes before sleep when the day strips itself down to what's left, I've searched for the guilt.
I've looked for the horror, the revulsion, the crushing weight that should come with knowing you took a life.
I've found nothing. A flatness where the feeling should be, like pressing on a bruise that's already healed.
Nick told me he was a monster. He said it on the sidewalk outside my old apartment, under a buzzing streetlight, with his knuckles against my jaw. He said it like a confession and a warning rolled into one, and I looked at him and I wasn't afraid.
I wonder if that's because I recognized him.
The drip falls. Eleven seconds. I count. The rhythm holds me.
Somewhere on the other side of that locked door, men are making decisions about my life in a language I don't speak, for reasons that have nothing to do with me and everything to do with the man I love.
I used to be a woman who helped strangers in car wrecks and put puppy band-aids on frightened children.
I still am. I'm also a woman who killed a man in her kitchen and sleeps soundly beside another man who kills for a living.
I am both of those women at the same time, and if I make it out of this room, I'm going to have to figure out how to live in the space between them.
If I make it out.
The thought arrives and I let it. I don't flinch from it. I hold it the way I hold a bad reading on my meter, with a clear head and the understanding that denial is a luxury I've never been able to afford.
I might not make it out.
My insulin is in a bag on the pavement. My body is a clock that has already started counting down.
The men who took me don't know what Type 1 means, or if they do, they don't care.
Either way, the result is the same. The water bottle on the table might buy me a few hours of hydration, but it won't stop the chemistry.
Nothing stops the chemistry except the thing I don't have.
I think about Nick's face when he reads my number in the morning. The small lift at the corner of his mouth. The way the word "good" sounds in his throat, low and warm and certain.
I think about a kitchen island and the application form.
I think about tomatoes.
Four seconds in. Six seconds out.
The drip falls. I start counting again.