28. #2
My phone was still somewhere near the pillows. There were probably messages I needed to answer. Schoolwork I needed to do. Something downstairs I could make for lunch before Grant inevitably asked what I'd eaten.
I closed my eyes instead.
I'd only been awake for maybe forty minutes, but exhaustion settled over me as though I'd spent the entire day doing something difficult. Within a few minutes, even the pressure of everything waiting for me outside the room began to fade.
Sleep was easier.
So I let myself disappear into it again.
A knock worked its way into my sleep slowly enough that I spent several seconds trying to make it belong to whatever I had been dreaming about.
I shifted beneath the duvet and buried my face deeper into the pillow.
My body felt heavier than it had before I fell asleep, my limbs reluctant to respond even as consciousness gradually returned.
The room was still dark, but that told me nothing about the time because I'd closed the blackout curtains myself.
For all I knew, I'd been asleep twenty minutes. It felt more like several hours.
The knock came again.
This time I knew I hadn't imagined it.
Before I could gather enough energy to answer, the bedroom door opened a few inches and a soft voice slipped through the darkness.
"Naomi?"
I lifted my head.
The hallway light outlined Isabel before I could make out anything else. She stood halfway through the doorway with a plate balanced in one hand, her free hand still resting on the knob as though she wasn't sure whether she should come farther into the room.
"Hey," she said when she saw me looking at her. Her voice dropped instinctively, almost to a whisper. "Sorry. I didn't mean to wake you."
"It's okay."
My throat felt thick from sleep. I pushed myself upright and reached toward the nightstand for my phone, squinting when the screen lit my face. 7:18.
I'd slept most of the day.
Isabel stepped farther into the room and used her elbow to push the door mostly closed behind her. "Grant made dinner. He wanted to know if you were hungry, so I told him I'd bring yours up."
"Thank you."
The response came automatically, politeness surviving even when apparently nothing else about me could manage to function normally. I shifted against the headboard and pulled the duvet over my lap while Isabel crossed the room.
She dressed casually with her hair pulled away from her face.
The plate in her hand looked considerably more put together than anything I'd eaten recently.
Slices of grilled meat took up one side, potatoes the other, with vegetables tucked into the remaining space.
Even from several feet away, I could smell the seasoning and the faint smokiness that always clung to whatever Grant made outside.
Normally, that would've been enough to make me hungry.
My stomach didn't react at all.
Isabel set the plate on the nightstand instead of handing it to me, then looked around the dark room. "Do you mind if I turn on a light?"
"Go ahead."
She chose the lamp rather than the overhead fixture, and I appreciated her for it immediately.
Warm light spread across only one side of the room, enough that we could see each other without making my eyes ache.
When she climbed onto the edge of the mattress, she tucked one leg beneath herself and settled far enough away that I didn't feel crowded.
"How are you feeling?"
"I'm okay."
The answer left my mouth so easily that I almost laughed.
Apparently fine had finally been retired only for okay to take its place.
Isabel didn't call me on it. She reached across the space between us and rested her hand over mine, giving it a gentle squeeze. "Grant said you've been a little stressed about school."
I looked at her.
That was all he told her?
I'd known Grant wasn't the type to announce my business to anyone who would listen, but Isabel wasn't just anyone.
She was his sister, one of the people he was closest to, and she'd been in and out of the house enough over the last two weeks that he would've had plenty of opportunities to tell her what happened.
She must have noticed that I'd practically disappeared.
She'd probably noticed that Grant had barely been working too.
Still, he'd apparently explained my absence with the least revealing truth available.
Some of the tension I'd felt when she walked in eased.
I hadn't asked him to keep what happened between us. I hadn't really been capable of asking for much of anything those first few days. He'd simply understood that being the person taking care of me didn't make the details of what happened his to distribute.
"Yeah." I pushed my fingers through my curls, which had dried sometime while I slept and now felt twice their normal size around my shoulders. "That's one way to put it."
Isabel smiled. "I know I'm still undergrad, so I'm probably useless for actual law school stuff, but if you ever want somebody to study with, I'm down."
A small smile pulled at my mouth before I could stop it. "Thank, Isabel. I appreciate it."
She squeezed my hand again before releasing it, and something about the ease of the conversation made me look down at where her hand had been.
I liked Isabel.
That wasn't exactly a revelation. I'd liked her almost immediately, despite the awkward circumstances surrounding how we'd met and the fact that my relationship with Grant had never come with a simple explanation.
She had never made me feel like I needed to provide one.
She teased me, invited me into conversations, told me embarrassing things about Grant whenever the opportunity presented itself and treated me like Naomi long before I knew what Grant and I were becoming.
Maybe what happened with Reese should've made me more cautious about deciding anyone was safe. Two weeks ago, I would've told anyone who asked that Reese was one of the safest people in my life.
Still, I didn't want what she'd done to turn every act of kindness from another woman into something I had to interrogate.
I rubbed my palm against the duvet and exhaled.
"I got into a fight with Rodney."
Isabel's smile disappeared.
Her eyes moved immediately toward the fading bruise above my eyebrow, and I watched the realization happen before she asked, "A physical fight?"
I nodded.
"Oh my God."
There wasn't any curiosity in her reaction. No immediate request for details, no questions about what I'd done or what had started it. She moved closer and wrapped her arms around me before I had time to decide whether I wanted to be touched.
I did.
My face pressed against her shoulder as I closed my eyes, and the simple softness of being held by another woman nearly undid all the effort I'd spent keeping myself together since waking up. Isabel smelled faintly like vanilla and when her hand moved slowly over my back, my throat tightened.
"Are you okay?" she asked quietly.
I inhaled through my nose and held the breath until I trusted my voice.
"I will be."
It was the most truthful answer I had.
Isabel held me for another few seconds before leaning back, keeping both hands loosely around my arms while she looked at me.
Concern had settled across her face in a way that made me want to reassure her even though I was the one sitting in bed wearing her brother's shirt because I'd barely managed to shower today.
Then her eyebrows pulled together.
"Was it because of your friend?"
The question surprised me enough that I stared at her.
Isabel immediately seemed to regret asking. "Sorry. You don't have to tell me that. I shouldn't have—are you even okay talking about this?"
"It's fine."
"You sure?"
"Yeah." I tucked a curl behind my ear. "I don't really know how to explain it anyway."
She waited without filling the silence for me.
"My memory from that night is still kind of..." I searched for the right word and settled on, "messy. There are parts I remember perfectly and then other parts that feel like somebody told me they happened instead of me actually being there."
The headache had mostly faded over the last week, but thinking too hard about the house could still bring back flashes with uncomfortable clarity.
I pushed those images away before they could settle.
"But Reese is the reason I went there," I continued. "She told me she needed something from the house. Rodney was already waiting for me when I got there, so..." I picked at a loose thread on the duvet. "There's obviously something I don't understand."
Isabel was quiet for a moment. "You think she knew he was there?"
"I don't know."
That was the worst part.
I wasn't ready to say any of that aloud. Saying it to Grant had already made the suspicion feel more real than I wanted it to.
"Im just closer to positive now that there's something going on," I finished.
Isabel's expression softened. "That's heartbreaking."
I looked down.
"Especially when it's somebody you've trusted for that long," she continued. "You expect people you don't know to disappoint you. I think it's different when it's somebody who's had enough time to learn exactly what would hurt you."
The words settled uncomfortably close to everything I'd been trying not to think about.
"I don't even know if she did anything yet."
"I know." Isabel shifted against the mattress. "And I'm not saying she did. I'm just saying I understand why not knowing would mess with your head."
I nodded.
That was exactly it.
If someone could've handed me proof that Reese had betrayed me, at least I'd know what I was grieving.
Instead, every memory of our friendship seemed to be waiting for me to decide whether it still meant what I thought it did.
College. Birthdays. Late-night phone calls.
Reese knowing what Rodney had done to me before almost anyone else did.
Her sitting beside me while I cried about things I hadn't even been willing to admit publicly were abuse.
If she'd betrayed me after knowing all of that, I didn't know what I was supposed to do with the years that came before it.