Chapter Four
JANIE
The room is better than I expected.
Not palatial, not even particularly comfortable with a double bed, clean sheets, a lamp on the nightstand throwing warm yellow light, and a window with blinds. But a real door and a working lock. That last one is carrying most of the weight right now.
Devil showed it to me herself. She guided us down the dimly-lit hall, Rose still slung on my hip, running her half-asleep assessment of everything we passed, and she stops at the door, pushes it open, and lets me step through first. Then she reaches past me, her thumb finding the lock without looking for it, and turns it, once. Click and back.
Then she watches me.
Not checking whether I understood the mechanics.
Checking whether I’d clocked the fact that it was mine to use.
Those are different things, and she seems to know it.
Two years of Craig, information was managed toward me from a distance, rationed and controlled.
Here is a woman handing over something with both hands.
“All yours,” she says. Her accent rounds out the words, warm and certain. It’s the particular warmth of someone who’s decided you’re worth it before you’ve done anything to earn it.
Rose’s head comes up off my shoulder. “Are there snacks?”
Devil looks at her. It’s the precise, measuring look of a woman taking a question at its full value.
“There are,” she says. “Follow me.”
The kitchen has stainless-steel benches, countertops, backsplashes, and appliances. It’s a room built for function, not comfort, and suits the place.
Rose eats everything.
Three crackers, half a banana, a slice of cheese, most of a cup of apple juice, and whatever comes out of a tin Devil produces from the back of a cabinet with the certainty of a woman who keeps a stocked kitchen on principle—small round cookies, something with coconut.
Rose works through them one at a time with the focused attention she gives all food, as if eating is serious business that deserves her full concentration.
Devil refills the juice without being asked and pushes the tin closer. She talks to Rose in the matter-of-fact register some adults use with children who’ve demonstrated they can handle real information. No baby talk, and Rose receives it with dignity.
The doorway is where I stay, watching them and working on breathing.
“Sit down, love,” Devil says, without looking up.
“I’m fine.” Old reflex, worn smooth.
She looks up then. Something settles around the edges of her face. It’s not pity, but something older than pity.
“I know,” she says. “Sit down anyway.”
So, I sit down.
Rose goes under mid-sentence.
She’s interrogating Devil about whether the bikes outside have names, then her head is on the table, and she’s gone, cheek flattened against the countertop, one fist loose beside the cookie tin. She does this. Fully operational one moment, nothing the next. Out and safe inside her own head.
Thirty-one pounds of pure trust, and sometimes that’s the most terrifying thing about her.
Devil gets her to the room without waking her.
Rose goes down on the covers and sprawls immediately into her usual three-quarters of whatever surface is available.
Devil tucks a blanket corner around her shoulder, straightens up, and looks at me with the quiet calm of a woman who has seen a great deal and judged very little of it.
“Lock’s yours,” she says. “Door’s solid. Sleep if you can.”
She leaves me to it.
Sleep doesn’t come, or comes and goes too fast to count.
Rose generates heat like a furnace. At some point, she flings an arm across my ribs, and I lie there staring at the ceiling while the compound settles into quiet around me. I’m still staring at it when a knock comes through the door. Three knuckles, not hard, and quiet enough not to wake Rose.
I ease off the bed. The lock turns smoothly and silently, and the door swings open onto the dim hall.
Empty.
Almost.
Mr. Rabbit is propped against the wall beside the door frame. And at the far end of the hall, just rounding the corner, the broad shape of him. Unhurried. Not looking back. Gone before I can say anything.
I pick up Mr. Rabbit and stand in the doorway for a moment with the hall quiet around me and something moving through my chest that I don’t have a name for and don’t reach for one.
“Thank you,” I say to the empty hall.
Back inside, I lock the door. Rose hasn’t moved, face down, furnace-warm. I tuck Mr. Rabbit in beside her, and she pulls him under her arm without waking, a reflex so practiced it lives somewhere below sleep.
The ceiling is just a ceiling in the dark.
My mouth goes dry around five thirty this morning.
The kitchen is at the end of the hall, twenty feet, maybe less.
The layout is already filed—exit points, distances, and the yard door at the far end—an old habit.
Two years of Craig trains it into you without asking, the constant quiet accounting of rooms and what they allow.
Rose doesn’t stir when I ease off the bed again. The lock turns smoothly and silently under my hand before the door swings open onto the dim hall.
Empty. It isn’t empty.
There’s a broad shape stretched out against the wall directly across from my door, boots crossed at the ankles and head tipped back against the plaster.
And for one startled second my heart climbs into my throat before I place the silver hair and understand that it’s Roam, asleep or near enough to it, on the floor outside the room where my daughter and I are sleeping.
It takes me another beat to notice what’s sitting upright against the doorframe by his boot: Mr. Rabbit, propped there as carefully as if he were made of glass, ears bent, one button eye catching the overnight light.
Rose must have dropped him somewhere between the bike and the bed, too far gone to notice, and somewhere in the hours since, this enormous stranger found him and carried him to the one door he knew the rabbit belonged behind before sitting down to wait out the night beside him.
Something I won’t let myself examine moves through me at the sight of the two of them there.
The hall is just a hall, all overnight light and closed doors and the distant sound of the building settling around us, and a man laid out across the length of it because he told me we’d be safe here and apparently meant to see to it personally.
I crouch and pick the rabbit up, his ears flopping over my fingers, and tuck him under my arm.
My mouth is still dry from sleep, so I edge past Roam’s outstretched boots as carefully as I’ve done anything in two years, watching his face the whole time for any sign I’ve woken him, but nothing in it changes.
In the kitchen at the end of the hall I find a glass in the second cabinet, left of the sink, fill it, and drink it slowly at the counter with Mr. Rabbit still pinned under one arm.
The compound breathing around me, and the whole time some part of me is tracking the man down the hall the way I’ve spent two years tracking Craig, except the tracking has gone soft at its edges, turned into something nearly the opposite of fear.
When the glass is empty, I rinse it, set it in the sink, and walk back the way I came with the rabbit under my arm.
Roam hasn’t moved. I don’t wake him. I only stand over him a moment longer than I have any reason to, taking in the plain fact of him there, before I step around his boots and ease my door shut behind me as quietly as I opened it, turning the lock more out of habit than out of any need for it.
Rose is exactly as I left her, face down, one arm flung wide across the space where Mr. Rabbit ought to be, and I work him gently back into the crook of it until she shifts and sighs and closes one hand around a battered ear without ever surfacing.
Two years I spent sleeping in a house where I was never alone, never unobserved, never the one who decided when a door opened or closed, and now, in a locked room in a compound full of strangers, one of them stretched out on the floor on the other side of the wall, my daughter’s rabbit back in her arms because he was the one who thought to save it a.
Something in my chest sits lighter than it has in longer than I remember how to measure.
It shouldn’t make sense, and I know that it doesn’t.
Rose breathes, and the warm Florida night presses against the window and the last thought that comes to me before my eyes close, the one I don’t let myself follow all the way to its end, is not whether he’ll still be out there come morning, but how quickly I have started counting on the fact that he will.