Chapter 10
MY HANDS ARE STILL.
I notice this the way you notice the absence of a sound you’ve been hearing so long it became part of your breathing.
My finger on the strap of my bag, flat. My finger on the edge of my coffee cup, flat.
My finger on the margin of my notebook, where the paper is still worn thin from weeks of frantic loops, flat and motionless, resting on a surface that remembers what my hands have forgotten how to do.
I don’t draw circles anymore.
It’s Tuesday. Week two. I’m sitting in the third row of Professor Salvatore’s lecture hall with my notebook open and my pen moving in careful, upright letters, and my handwriting has never been better.
Each word is neat, contained, every stroke deliberate, because if I focus on the shape of the letters I don’t have to focus on the shape of his mouth or the place on my wrist where his thumb drew a circle that might as well have belonged to another girl’s life.
He’s lecturing on threat assessment today. How systems identify danger. How the most sophisticated defenses are built not to block every threat but to distinguish between the ones that matter and the ones that don’t.
I write this down. All of it. Word for word.
I don’t look up.
THE FIRST SEPARATION lasted three weeks, and it was a knife. This one is different. This one is anesthesia.
I get up in the morning. I shower. I put on a dress—not the blue one with the flowers, not yet, I can’t wear that one yet because his hand was in my hair when I was wearing it and the fabric remembers even if I’m trying not to.
I put on the gray one, the one that doesn’t have memories attached to it, and I button my coat and I walk to campus and I go to class and I take notes and I eat when David puts food in front of me and I go to the library and I work on my thesis and I go home and I lie in bed and I stare at the Iowa-shaped water stain on my ceiling and I don’t cry.
I did my crying. On a bathroom floor, with my forehead on my knees, the day he called me Miss Lively and cut me clean. That was enough. I’m Robert and Martha Lively’s daughter, and we don’t cry twice about the same thing. We fix the fence and we get on with it.
Except the fence isn’t broken. I’m broken. And I don’t know how to fix that with wire and stubbornness, so I do the only thing I know how to do, which is show up, sit down, and be excellent at the things I can control.
My thesis is coming along. The modular framework is solid.
The scalability model passes every test I’ve run.
The security integration section, the one he gave me advice on, is the strongest part of the paper, and I hate that.
I hate that the best part of my work carries his fingerprints, but I won’t cut it because it’s good, and I won’t sabotage good work to spite a man who isn’t worth the sabotage.
He’s worth it. He told me he wasn’t and I told him he was and I meant it. I still mean it. That’s the worst part.
Dr. Malvar reads my latest draft and tells me it’s exceptional.
She doesn’t mention the formal review or the F that appeared on my record or the department meeting where Agnes Cuthbert wrapped a knife in policy language and aimed it at my throat.
She just tells me the work is good and asks if I need anything, and I say no, and she nods, and I walk out of her office and my hands are still.
SUNDAY. 1:15 PM.
“Baby girl.” Mama’s voice, warm and flat and three thousand miles too far away. “How’s my city mouse?”
“Good, Mama. How’s Daddy’s hip?”
“Oh, he’s walking with character again. Went out to check the calves this morning and came back pretending he wasn’t wincing. I told him the calves don’t need checking at five AM and he said the calves disagree.”
I almost smile. The muscles try. They get halfway and stop, like a car that turns over but won’t catch.
“And you, sweetheart? You eating?”
“David feeds me.”
“That boy’s a saint. You tell him Martha says he’s got a standing invitation for pot roast if he ever makes it to Nebraska.”
“I’ll tell him.”
A pause. The kettle. The creak of Daddy’s chair. The specific, particular silence of a mother listening to the things her daughter isn’t saying.
“Elsa, honey.” Softer now. “You sound thin again.”
“I’m fine, Mama. Just busy with the thesis.”
The lie comes out smooth. Practiced. I’ve been lying to Martha Lively for weeks now, and each time the skill of it horrifies me a little less, and that’s how I know I’m losing something.
Not weight, not sleep, not grades, but some essential Elsa-ness, some honesty that used to live in my voice like a second pulse, and it’s going quiet.
“You’d tell me.” Not a question this time. A statement. Martha Lively, who can read her daughter through a phone line the way a farmer reads a sky, isn’t asking. She’s holding up a mirror and waiting for me to look.
“I will, I promise.”
I hang up. I sit on my bed. The phone is warm in my hand. My fingers are wrapped around it, perfectly still, no circle on the case, no absent tracing of the edge.
Iowa watches me from the ceiling. It has no opinion.
THURSDAY. THIRD ROW.
He enters at two minutes past the hour. He’s wearing the navy suit, the one I catalogued during the first semester as formal, no rolled sleeves, closed.
His hair is perfect. His posture is the posture of a man who hasn’t lost a single minute of sleep, who hasn’t hit his desk with his fist, who hasn’t written a note in Italian that his control couldn’t contain.
He looks the same.
I hate that he looks the same.
The lecture is on vulnerability scanning.
How to search a system for weaknesses before an attacker does.
His voice moves through the hall with its usual authority, low, accented, pulling two hundred students into attention, and I write every word and I don’t look up and my hands don’t move except to write.
Thirty minutes in, David’s pen stops.
I feel it more than see it—the cessation of motion beside me, David’s constant idle scribbling going quiet. I glance sideways. He’s not writing. He’s looking at me. Then at the podium. Then back at me.
He doesn’t say anything. David, who always has something to say, who fills silence with easy warmth and protein bars and batting averages, is quiet. He’s looking at my hands.
My hands are still. No circles.
After class, he falls into step beside me. Doesn’t speak for a full block, and it’s unusual enough that I notice.
“Lively.”
“Burnes.”
“You stopped doing the thing.”
“What thing?”
“The circle thing. With your finger.” He’s not looking at me. He’s looking straight ahead, hands in his jacket pockets, cap pulled low. “You used to do it all the time. On your notebook, your coffee cup, your bag. You did it constantly. And now you don’t.”
My hand is at my side. My fingers are loose. They don’t reach for my strap or my wrist or any of the surfaces where my circles used to live.
“I didn’t know you noticed that.”
“I notice stuff about you, Elsa.” No edge. No agenda. Just the plain fact of a friend who has been paying attention. “You stopped about two weeks ago. Right around the time you stopped eating lunch unless I physically bring you food and started looking at me like you’re hearing me from underwater.”
My throat tightens.
“I’m fine, David.”
“You’re not fine. And that’s okay. You don’t have to be fine.
” He stops walking. I stop too. He faces me, and his expression is the most serious I’ve ever seen on him, which is saying something because David’s resting face is a golden retriever’s.
“You don’t have to tell me what happened.
But you’ve to eat. And you’ve to let someone be here for you, because whatever this is, you’re disappearing into it, and I’m watching it happen, and I’m not built to just watch. ”
I look at David, who’s twenty-one and plays baseball and builds spreadsheets about girls and has never once asked me to be anything other than exactly who I’m, and something in my chest shifts. Not cracks—I’m past cracking. Shifts, like a foundation settling, finding a new place to bear weight.
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay what?”
“Okay, you can be here.”
He nods once. Pulls a granola bar from his jacket pocket.
I realize he’s been carrying these for me, keeping them on his person the way someone carries an EpiPen for a person with allergies, and hands it to me.
We walk the rest of the way to the humanities building in silence, and I eat the granola bar, and it tastes like dust, but I eat it.
THE COFFEE SHOP HAS changed.
Joe is gone. The Thursday counter is staffed by a girl I don’t recognize, someone new, someone whose shoes are campus-appropriate and whose latte art is mediocre and who doesn’t know my order before I give it.
I stand at the counter and I say latte, please and she makes it wrong, but I take it to my table by the window anyway.
I drink it and I don’t mind, because minding would require caring, and caring would require feeling, and feeling is a door I closed on a bathroom floor two weeks ago.
Joe’s absence is its own message. Luciano pulled his men.
Not just the barista cover, but all of them.
The newspaper reader outside the science building, the one near the library, the one at the dining hall.
I haven’t spotted a single wrong pair of shoes in two weeks.
The surveillance that used to wrap around my campus life like a second coat, the constant quiet proof that someone was watching, someone cared, someone couldn’t stop protecting me even while pretending I didn’t exist—gone.
During the first avoidance, he sent his men. He treated me like air, but the air was guarded.
This time the guards are gone too.
I drink my wrong latte, open my thesis, and work.
IN CLASS, I’M A MODEL student.