Chapter Seven
Molly
Another three weeks changed everything and nothing.
The bruises faded. That was at least the most visible part of it.
The mottled purple on my jaw softened to a sickly yellow, then to a ghost of itself, then to nothing.
The restraint marks on my wrists went through the same slow metamorphosis, the angry red giving way to pink, then to a faint silvery scarring that Doc said might fade completely with time and might not.
I chose not to think about the might not.
I was getting good at choosing what to think about, which was its own kind of victory, hard-won and fragile as spun glass.
I could eat solid food. Small meals, carefully portioned because Xavier still cut things into pieces that bordered on the molecular, and I still pretended not to notice, and the pretending had become a ritual between us, a private language of care disguised as comedy.
I'd gained back seven pounds. Doc had weighed me this morning with the same gentle, narrated precision he brought to everything, and when the number came up, Xavier had looked at me like I'd just bench-pressed a truck.
"Seven pounds," he'd said, and the pride in his voice was so disproportionate to the achievement that I'd laughed—a real laugh, the kind that came from my stomach instead of my throat, the kind that still surprised me every time it surfaced, like finding a piece of jewelry you thought had been lost.
The withdrawal was mostly behind me. Mostly.
The tremors had stopped, but my sleep was still an occasional minefield—some nights I'd drift off against Xavier's chest and surface eight hours later feeling almost human, and other nights the dreams came, with their fluorescent lights and their needles and Ruby's voice as I lost consciousness, and I'd wake up screaming with my fingernails embedded in Xavier's forearms while he held me and talked me back to the surface.
He never flinched. Not once. Just held and talked and waited, and when I'd surface, gasping and disoriented and sick with guilt over the crescents my nails had carved into his skin, he'd show me the marks and say, "Battle scars.
Very distinguished. Walker is going to be jealous. "
The hormonal chaos Doc had warned about was the gift that kept on giving.
My moods swung like a pendulum operated by a drunk toddler fine one moment, weeping the next, furious at nothing an hour after that.
The three blood tests had all come back negative for pregnancy, and the relief had been so enormous that I'd cried for forty-five minutes straight while Xavier held me and Doc stood in the doorway looking professionally stoic and personally devastated.
Explaining I hadn't been touched sexually, even though I'd still been violated, was an important line. I was relieved to hear the other girls were okay even though I'd never seen them as they kept us apart. But the fertility drugs had done their damage, and my endocrine system was staging a slow, dramatic protest against being forced into overdrive and then abruptly cut off. Hot flashes. Cramps that bent me double. Emotional volatility that made PMS look like a gentle suggestion. Now that my head was clear, I’d queried the sedation. They’d wanted me pregnant, but surely that wasn’t good for the baby?
Doc had gone really quiet then, and said that once the pregnancy had happened, he doubted they would’ve given me any more.
I’d worked out they didn’t care what happened to me afterwards, I didn’t think I would have lived long after I’d given birth.
I knew them. I knew Ruby had panicked over something I’d read from her lips.
I’d challenged her. I just didn’t remember the rest of it, but it wasn’t important.
Xavier handled all of it. Every mood swing, every crying jag, every middle-of-the-night hot flash where I threw the covers off and then immediately wanted them back.
He handled it with the same steady, immovable patience he'd shown on the rooftop, except now there was a texture to it that hadn't been there before, a tenderness that had deepened over four weeks of proximity into something that felt less like rescue and more like devotion. Or maybe that was wishful thinking? Because despite his words, I wasn’t stupid enough not to know he hadn’t signed up for this.
We'd settled into a rhythm. Mornings were oatmeal and the tiny banana or apple pieces and whatever gentle mockery I could muster about his culinary dictatorship.
Doc came once a day—morning—and Xavier narrated every examination with the same careful precision, though I'd started needing less narration and more just his hand in mine.
Afternoons were the hardest, when the fatigue hit and my body demanded rest but my mind associated sleep with vulnerability, and Xavier would stretch out beside me and tell me stories about his abuela's restaurant or Ranger school or the time Maddox accidentally adopted a three-legged dog during an operation in Bogotá and smuggled it back to base in his duffel bag.
Apparently Xavier hadn't worked with the other guys in the same unit, just joint operations.
Evenings were quiet, the two of us on the couch in his living room, which I'd graduated to during week three, me tucked under his arm with a blanket over my lap and the TV on low, watching nature documentaries because the narrators' voices were soothing and nothing exploded.
He called me little one. Sweetheart. Baby.
Good girl, when I ate all my food or took my medication without being reminded or let Doc draw blood without squeezing Xavier's hand hard enough to fracture bone.
I called him Daddy—not constantly, not as a reflex, but in the moments when the walls came down and I was just me, the me underneath, the one who'd wanted this her whole life, even when I didn’t know something was missing.
In the dark, when the nightmares retreated and his arms were around me and his heartbeat was under my ear.
In the morning, when he brought me coffee with too much cream because Doc said caffeine was okay in small amounts and Xavier had decided that "small amounts" meant the mug had to be more cream than coffee.
In the moments between moments, when I forgot to be afraid and the word just fell out of me, natural as breathing.
He always answered. Every time. Always.
But four weeks also meant that the world outside Xavier's house had continued to exist, and it was getting louder.
I heard it for the first time on a Tuesday morning, which was fitting, since Tuesdays had become a landmark in my new life, the day of the week Xavier had given me as my first anchor.
I was in the kitchen, sitting at the table with my hands wrapped around the too-creamy coffee, feeling almost normal in a way that still startled me.
Xavier was in the hallway just outside the kitchen, his phone pressed to his ear, and he'd pulled the door mostly shut, not closed, never closed, because we'd established early on that closed doors between us were a boundary my nervous system wasn't ready for.
I wasn't trying to eavesdrop. But weeks of hypervigilance had left me with hearing that could pick up a whispered conversation through drywall, and Xavier's voice—usually so controlled, so deliberately modulated, had an edge to it that I'd never heard directed at anything other than my medical updates.
"I know Walker’s covering for me, Gideon. I know that." A pause. The sound of him pacing, his socked feet on the hardwood. "I need to organize some interviews for an evening manager." Another pause, longer this time. "We have a new Little to find?"
Silence. Then a sharp exhale through his nose, the sound he made when he was processing information he didn't like. I knew that was what they did. As well as everything else. Found people like me.
"That's exactly the kind of corner-cutting that—" He stopped. Listened. More silence. More pacing. I stared into my coffee and felt something cold settle in my stomach that had nothing to do with withdrawal.
"Give me a couple more days. I’ve been speaking to Carlton every day.
Just hold the line, Gid. I'll figure it out." I knew Carlton was one of his managers at Kingdom, the huge nightclub where I’d used my lip-reading skills, and instead of going for help, I’d challenged Ruby about it.
In my defense, I’d expected a reasonable explanation.
That they weren’t really talking about “securing” a new girl.
The call ended. When he pushed the door open and walked back into the kitchen, his face was the neutral mask he wore when he was managing something he didn't want me to worry about.
I knew that mask. I'd been studying his face for four weeks with the obsessive attention of someone learning a new alphabet, and every micro-expression was a letter I'd committed to memory.
"How's the coffee?"
"More cream than coffee, as usual." I wrapped both hands tighter around the mug. "Your commitment to dairy is truly heroic."
He smiled, but it didn't quite reach the furrow, and reached for his own coffee.
"You need to go back to work," I said.
The mug paused halfway to his lips. His eyes found mine over the rim, and I saw the rapid assessment of how much I'd heard, how much I'd understood, how much damage the information was going to do to the fragile ecosystem we'd built in this kitchen with its tiny banana pieces and its too-creamy coffee.
"That's not something you need to worry about."