Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Cleo
I sip the last of the tea and pick at the breakfast, and the exhaustion hits—sudden, bone-deep, as if my body has finally decided it’s safe to collapse.
Eddie takes the tray without a word. Barret says, careful as if offering a lifeline, “You could rest—or get out of the room and see the place. Get to know your surroundings.” He sounds like he’s trying not to impose, and for the first time since they brought me here, I want to let someone decide for me.
Honestly, I want to stay seated and watch the sea hit the shore.
It calms me in a way I never thought possible—the endless rhythm pounding against rock as if it could sand down the parts of me left jagged.
The view is no clearer from the leather chair than the bed, so I choose the bed. In no time, my eyelids grow heavy.
The room shifts around me. The ocean hushes into a distant murmur. The heater clicks in the corner like a metronome counting down.
And then Manhattan snaps into place.
Marble floors. Glass walls. A door that looks open until you touch the handle, and it won’t turn. Perfume layered over bleach until the scent makes my throat ache. A clock with no hands. Shoes lined up on the mat like soldiers who will never question orders.
“Smile, Cleo.”
His voice is quiet. That’s the worst part—the way it doesn’t have to rise to make the room shrink. On other days, it’s a low, controlled cut, a tone that suggests patience, and then it slices away.
Patience doesn’t explode with him—it unravels in slow motion.
His jaw ticks, his fingers curl as if he’s testing what might snap first. A faint flare of his nostrils is the only warning before the air in the apartment thins to nothing, forcing me to pull each breath through a pinhole.
His footsteps follow, not loud, but exact—each one a blueprint for what’s coming.
He tells me to smile like it’s a simple request, and I know—down to how my palms go clammy and my nails press crescent moons into them—that I’m not allowed to say no.
My body remembers how to become small. My skin remembers how to pretend.
I want to disappear so badly I can taste it, like the metallic tang you get before something breaks.
I want to leave and never return, but those are dangerous thoughts in that apartment, and they have a price.
That apartment was a prison with good taste and a razor under every pillow.
The things he did with a quiet voice left marks you couldn’t stitch or explain.
I learned how to make the smile he wanted fit my face even when my insides were folding.
I learned how to plan an exit and then hide it again because survival meant playing the part.
When he says it—“Smile, Cleo”—I can feel the old panic like a freight train in my bones. It’s not loud, nor dramatic, but definitely inevitable. And in that soundless way, the room closes in, and I am back in a life that taught me to swallow myself whole.
“You should thank me,” he murmurs at my throat, breath warm and clean with mint and money. “Not everyone gets this kind of care.”
Thank him?
My hands go numb. My mind slips out of my body and stands in the doorway like a spectator at its funeral. I watch him speak to the woman he invented the day I slid the ring onto my finger—the version of me that knows how to be small, correct, and pleasing.
She nods at every sentence, mouth soft, eyes lowered, because if she doesn’t, he does what he always does.
His gaze sharpens until my throat burns with apologies I don’t mean.
He keeps pressing on a slip until it becomes a confession I can’t take back.
He pulls away warmth like it’s a privilege I haven’t earned, makes the calls that remind me he can ruin me outside these walls too, rewrites the day so that every wrong sticks to my skin.
My body knows the routine before my mind does.
My stomach knots until I can’t swallow. My palms sweat and then go cold.
My chest rises too fast, shallow gulps of air that never feel like enough.
I clench my jaw so tight it hums in my ears, but I keep my face smooth because anything else is dangerous.
Inside, my thoughts scatter, darting like trapped birds, banging against the cage of my skull until I force them into silence.
He turns humiliation into a lesson, carves obedience into me until I learn that silence is survival. Watching it, I feel a slow, precise machine dismantling me piece by piece, stripping me down to parts I don’t recognize. And all I can do is sit inside my wreckage and remember how to breathe.
I want to escape from this life, but the windows don’t open.
The air tastes reheated.
The city lights flick on like someone flipping a switch. He tells me stories about friends with yachts and foreign names. He tells me who is dangerous and who is useful. He tells me what I will wear, what I will say, and what I will do when someone offers me champagne.
He doesn’t have to tell me what happens if I get it wrong.
I get it wrong one night anyway. A laugh slips out at the wrong time. I don’t even remember what for. The sound is small, human. It bounces off the marble and lands between us like a dropped glass.
His smile doesn’t falter. His hand on my back does. Pressure, steady, precise. A reminder. “Careful,” he whispers with teeth that never show. “I can make you disappear in a way no one will question.”
The word ‘disappear’ lives under my tongue for days. I swallow it until it feels like a bone.
Someone knocks. The door opens without permission. A woman brings in a tray. Water. Fruit. The same arrangement every morning, like proof that time is passing. She sets it down and leaves without meeting my eyes.
In the dream, I try to eat but can’t. The fork is too heavy. My hand won’t lift. The ring burns where it sits.
Then he’s at the table, close enough that the silverware shivers when he sets his hand down.
He takes my wrist like it belongs to him and yanks.
The fork skates off the edge and slams to the floor.
His palm crashes against my cheek, and the taste of metal spreads across my tongue as my lip splits. The room tilts.
He pins my arm against my ribs with his forearm until I can’t pull away, until my fingers turn numb. His grip lingers on my skin long after he lets go, an imprint that blossoms into a bruise I will have to hide under shirts and empty explanations.
I jerk awake with the taste of copper at the back of my throat and the sweater bunched against my mouth.
For a second, I don’t know where I am. Marble?
No. Cedar. City sirens? No. Waves hitting rock.
A cologne I used to fear? No. Something cleaner, warmer.
Eddie. Barret. The names line up and hold like lifelines I’m still too dizzy to reach.
I gag out a sound that could be a cry, but it breaks loose before I can stop it. A hoarse, raw scream rips out of me, scraping my throat on its way up. Sweat slicks my skin along the collarbone, cold and sudden. My palms are damp. Despite my open eyes, my chest heaves as if trapped in a dream.
My heart bolts like something waiting for permission to run and finally gets it. I swallow uselessly and taste iron again. Somewhere inside me, a small animal scream wants out, and I clamp my jaw until it quiets, but the sound rattles the inside of my ribs anyway.
The room is dimmer now. Fog has thickened outside, a sheet pulled over the view. The tray on the table waits with its quiet offering. A berry bleeds into the porridge like a bruise spreading.
My hands remember the wrong grip. My skin braces for the wrong touch. The door is still ajar.
I want to call out, and I want to swallow the sound. Both urges arrive at once and fight in my throat until nothing gets past.
Footsteps in the hall. Two sets. One even, practiced. One restless, skittering. I know which is which. I know them like weather.
Eddie knocks once and then does not come in. Barret does not knock at all. He stops on the threshold like a tide that chose mercy.
“Cleo?” Eddie’s voice is low. Frayed at the edges. “I’m here for you.”
I want to shake my head and nod, and I want to scream and crawl out of my skin all at once.
“Can I—?” Barret clears his throat. “May we come in?”
I nod because speech feels like a far shore, and I cannot swim that deep yet.
They step in. Eddie stays near the dresser, hands visible, body angled away so I don’t feel cornered.
I notice and hate that he had to learn how to move like that for my sake.
Barret lowers himself to the rug, back to the glass wall, long legs folding in a way that looks like it will hurt.
He does it anyway, so our eyes meet at the same level.
“It was a bad one,” Barret says without asking. His voice is sanded down, careful. “Do you want the window open?”
My throat works. “A little,” I manage.
He stands and cracks the latch. The first line of cold air finds me and slices the room into then and now. I inhale until the fresh, sharp air fills my lungs and finally, finally, I can breathe.
Eddie doesn’t fill the space with advice or offer the list of things the therapists told us. He looks at the teapot and says, “I’ll bring more hot water.”
He leaves and comes back with a kettle that sighs and a plate of toast cut into neat halves. My stomach flips. I think of red circles on a tray. He sees something in my face and puts the plate down without pushing it toward me.
Barret sits again, digs in his pocket, and brings out a guitar pick, turning it over with the side of his thumb.
There’s no guitar, but he lets the motion ground him.
Or me. I can’t tell. “When I can’t get out of a song,” he says, “I change the instrument. Same melody, different body. Helps me remember I can make choices.”
It’s not a metaphor for everything. Still, it threads through me as if it might be.
“I dreamed of doors,” I manage. The words come raw, scratched on the way out. “Ones that looked open but weren’t.”
Barret nods once. “Yeah. Those.”
Eddie pours water. Steam curls between us, softening the corners the nightmare left. “We can take the door off,” he says, gentle, almost dry. “Literally. If you want.”
It’s absurd. It helps. I huff out a breath that could pass for a laugh if you were generous.
“I don’t want to be a project,” I say, and the room goes still in a way that doesn’t choke. “I don’t want to be . . . managed.”
“You won’t be,” Eddie says. “You say how this goes.”
“Even if I say . . . it doesn’t?” My voice thins. “Even if I can’t do tea, or windows, or . . . us?”
Barret answers before Eddie can. “Even then,” he says. “Especially then—we’re here for you at your own accord.”
The kettle ticks as it cools. The ocean keeps doing what oceans do, pulling itself at the shore until even the sky looks tired of holding it. I pull the sweater tighter and tuck my knees up so I can be smaller without vanishing entirely.
“Tell me something stupid,” I say, surprising the three of us with how calm my voice sounds.
Barret blinks. “Like what?”
“Something that didn’t matter. Before.” I gesture at the air as if time is a pile of things we can sort. “Something ordinary.”
He thinks, thumb turning the guitar pick until it flashes. “I once set a pan on fire trying to flambé bananas,” he says. “I poured some booze I found downstairs and prayed. The curtains survived. The eyebrows did not.”
A strange sound leaves me, close to a laugh and near a sob. “You had eyebrows to spare,” I tell him.
Eddie’s mouth lifts. He makes a soft, careful joke, the kind that arrives like a promise. “He didn’t lose anything vital, but I don’t let him near the kitchen anymore. Hence, the chef and the help.”
The tea sits between us, patient as a thing that has learned to wait. My hands find the mug, and the first sip surprises me. It is sweeter than I expected, warm and steady in my stomach, a small, honest thing that does not ask anything in return.
The dream does not disappear. It clings like perfume on a coat sleeve. Still, it makes room. The room opens around this: a cracked open window, a ridiculous story about flaming bananas, two men trying to be ordinary with me.
I look at them. The man who learned how to stand where I will not feel cornered. And then at the man who lowers himself to the rug so our eyes can meet without me having to work to reach him.
“You’re both terrible cooks,” I say.
It comes out light, sharp, and somehow safe. It is nothing and it is everything. I wind that sentence like a ribbon around my wrist so I have a place to return to when the room tilts.
Barret’s grin is quick and uncertain, bright and nervous in the way the sun remembers how to come back. Eddie exhales like someone holding his breath for a long time and finally lets it go.
“Can I try outside?” I ask, voice small as tide foam. “Just the terrace. With you.”
“Yeah,” Barret answers immediately, already on his feet. “Yeah, we can do that.”
Eddie nods, methodically, checking the door and then me. “Shoes?” he asks.
I look down at my socks. Fuzzy, ridiculous. A tiny rebellion against polished floors and rules.
“These are enough,” I say.
We cross the room together. The terrace door opens, and a pale light slips through the fog. The terrace is a strip of stone that juts out over the cliff, a private edge to this cedar-and-glass mansion that feels absurd and impossible to all the old rules I learned.
The air bites, then eases. The old panic claws at my throat for a second, an animal waking. I press my hands to the rail and push against the world like I have a right to be here. I whisper, the sound thin under gulls and wind, “This is mine.”
No one corrects me.
They do not argue, do not pat my head, or tell me I am being foolish.
They stand there with me, two not-so-ordinary men who are learning the rules again, and that is everything.
The terrace boards are cool under my feet. The sea throws itself at the world and withdraws, again and again, as if practice makes permission. Barret stands on my left, not touching. Eddie, on my right, hands in his pockets like restraint is a language he’s finally learned.
The nightmare doesn’t leave. It just steps back, giving me a view.
“Tell me another stupid thing,” I say, and Barret obliges. Eddie adds one, and I stand there with tea heat in my palms, wind in my hair, and I hear the sound of water trying again and again and again.