Chapter 23
I sit in my car far longer than necessary just across the road from her bus after I leave.
The engine is quiet, the interior dim, and the cracked windshield of the bus is still visible through the trees behind the bar. The car’s heater ticks as it cools, a soft metallic sound that gives my thoughts something to pace against.
The environment she is in now is inadequate.
That is the problem.
Her bus is a nest built from necessity, not intention. There are too many exits and opportunities for interruption. Far too much noise bleeding in from the world she insists on surviving inside of. The variables stack like kindling.
It is not a controlled space, and she is not a woman who thrives in chaos.
She endures it, sure, but she sharpens herself against it.
She doesn’t need to steel herself off, she needs to come undone and stay that way.
Let everything in so that she can process it in a way that won’t be hindered by all the noise around her.
I close my eyes and see her again standing in front of me. Letting myself remember the feeling of her chest against mine as her breath came in unsteady, the sight of her pupils when they had blown with something she is fighting tooth and nail.
Once a week is no longer sufficient.
It was tolerable when the work was excavation and we were mapping the terrain or identifying fault lines, but the dynamic has changed. Our work is no longer linear, it’s recursive.
I lean back against the headrest and stare at the ceiling of the car, keeping every little impulse in check as I force myself to think through it. This can’t be like when I burned my parent’s home down with them inside it, that was too quick of thought and cost me years as a teen.
This has to be anything but sloppy.
I don’t regret revealing myself to her, not for a second.
Her reaction was precisely what I need it to be.
All that anger braided with want, her fear stripped down to instinct rather than panic.
She finally stood her ground and on some level believed in what she said.
That alone earns her something more than a weekly appointment and a coach she no longer trusts.
She requires immersion.
A sterile office or bus will no longer do. There are too many eyes here and places she can run without understanding what she’s running from. I pull my eyes from her bus and look to the line of road ahead of me, and to where it bends toward the edges of the city.
I already know the perfect place.
I tell myself it’s not impulsive. I’ve already been cataloguing locations for years; spaces where sound travels differently and where the rules of proximity can be rewritten without interference.
The cabin was originally meant as a contingency, and I can’t say I had ever thought I would use it for this, but it is perfect for the next step.
I can’t let her continue to dilute the process by dividing her attention between survival and healing.
She cannot do both at the same time and I’m no longer willing to watch her try.
The cabin is exactly the place she needs to be to accomplish all of this.
And she may have set boundaries, but they aren’t walls. They are doors and she’s already showed me exactly where the keys are to unlock them.
I reach down to the dial and turn my car into drive, the engine smooth as I pull from the lot without turning on the radio. My hands steady on the wheel and my pulse calm where it rests in satisfaction for my budding ideas.
This is not violence.
It’s intervention.
I consider the logistics with the same detached precision I apply to everything else. Timing. Windows. Cover stories. What she’ll fight against first and what she’ll surrender once she understands the parameters.
She will run, as she should.
The chase will be part of the recalibration, because she won’t get far. I already know how she moves when she’s frightened or when she’s angry. I know the exact moment when she often stops thinking and begins reacting.
I also know what will make her stop.
I pull onto the highway and let the city lights begin to fall behind me.
Once she’s isolated—once the noise is gone and the only thing left is the work—she will hate me.
But she will listen.
Then she will understand.
I don’t tell myself this is for her own good, that would be dishonest. This is for us. For the space required to finish what we started the moment she sat down in that mirrored room and chose not to move on.
I grip the wheel a little tighter, satisfaction curling through my veins and warming my thoughts.
Once a week was patience.
This—
This is commitment.