2. CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER TWO
The Drive
The car was moving before I’d finished sitting down.
Matthew, not Dr. Caldren. Not yet, and I already knew which one I’d rather keep. Caleb was driving.
“Hi, Amber.” He said it like a line he’d rehearsed and still didn’t believe.
His band was thin, older than mine, worn to a dull shine at the clasp, on a wrist I hadn’t thought to look at until now.
“This is Caleb. He’s going to be checking in on you the first weeks.”
Not a favor. An assignment, made the moment you acquire something and need its condition logged.
Caleb stared out the window, jaw locked, a man doing what he’d been told and hating himself for it.
The leather was ordered. The locks were the point.
We drove.
The car held his smell. Cedar, and under it something clean from the clinic. I hadn’t decided to learn it. It was already filed, in the drawer where the count lived.
I watched the city go by like a television bolted into the corner of a hospital room, on for the sound of it, not for anything happening on the screen.
It was easier with my eyes on the window instead of on him.
The clinic sat on a quiet block off a wider one.
The wider one fed into a boulevard. The boulevard fed into a road I didn’t know the name of.
At the end of that road there was a gate.
Behind the gate there was Crownhill Residences.
“Do you think I’m going to hurt you?” Matthew said.
“No.”
“You should.” He said it like a fact already filed, not a question left open.
I looked at him. He was looking out the window, and the light did something to his profile I gave myself exactly one second to notice before I made myself stop.
His ring hand was on his knee, the green seam visible, close enough to my own knee that I could measure the distance and count what it would cost him nothing to close.
He didn’t close it. That was starting to look like his whole method: close, and doing nothing, until doing nothing became the thing that moved you.
I was supposed to be afraid of him. He’d just told me to be. I wasn’t, and I filed that too, the same place everything about him kept ending up lately.
The space between touching and not touching yet.
I wanted it gone. It was the same need that had followed his fingers off my wrist that morning, awake again now, low and patient, with nowhere to go and no one to tell.
Fear and want had taken the same room in me, and I couldn’t get a blade between them.
“Ask me for something,” he said.
“What?”
“Anything you want. Test it.”
The card was in my closed palm. The matchbook was in the watch pocket at my waistband. The jeans were the only piece of clothing they had let me keep through intake, because Matthew had said, “Some of the old life can come, Amber.”
I hadn’t slept right since intake.
I had done the seven-count breath three hundred and fourteen times by my count. The seven-count was not mine. It was older than Crownhill. Older than Matthew. Older than my mother’s voice, which I had been obeying my entire life without knowing I was obeying anything at all.
“What if I don’t ask for nothing?” I said. The grammar was wrong. It was the only thing I had left that was mine.
Matthew turned his head. He held me in his line of sight.
“Then you’ll starve.”
Adherence: 95.
Caleb’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror. He looked and looked away.
Matthew’s phone buzzed. He took it out and held it so I could see.
Edward: The file is secure. Waiting on your go.
I read the text. Matthew watched my wrist.
Not my face. My wrist.
The number on the band didn’t move. Adherence: 95. He held the phone there like a man holding a thermometer he expects to rise.
But I had seen him in the moment before the screen was fully visible. His face unguarded, a man who had never cared about anything as much as he cared about knowing what I was feeling right now, in this car. Then he remembered he was supposed to be clinical. But I had seen.
He put the phone face-down on his thigh instead of back in his pocket, close enough that the ring still caught the last of the screen’s light.
I felt him go still beside me, the specific stillness of someone waiting to see what I’d do.
I didn’t move away. That was the answer, and it was already given.
“Caleb’s wife asks after you,” he said. “Marissa.”
He watched the number.
“They have a boy now. Ben.”
He watched the number.
The names should have done something to me. I was certain of that, if nothing else. Made my heart rate spike, made my cortisol surge, made the number climb. They didn’t. The number stayed flat.
He put the phone away. Something in his face settled, the look of a man confirming a result.
He had been holding names up to me to see which ones still cut. None of them did. There was no one he didn’t have access to. There was no one who could help me, because everyone was already inside his system.
The system was a web. I was not trapped. I was connected.
That was the same thing.
I had the sensation, somewhere in my chest where the band couldn’t read it, that I had been in this building before. Not in memory. In design.
I closed my hand harder on the card.
The SUV took the long curve onto the access road for Crownhill Residences, and the road was lined with trees that grow only where someone has paid for them to grow.
“You’re going to do well here, Amber. Most of them don’t notice the patterns until the second intake. Most of them don’t notice the cycle until the seventh.”
Seven.
The number was not a number when he said it. The number was a count. The count was the count my body had been doing for as long as I could not remember not doing.
But for a single second, between the e and the v of his saying it, my shoulders dropped half an inch.
I caught it before I chose to. I put the half-inch back. The band didn’t log it. Matthew did.
Crownhill came up over the rise slow and inevitable, old money rising, cream stone, long balconies with no people on them. The fountain in the front circle held a pale stone woman with her hands cupped.
Above the residents’ entrance was a small crest, crown over a hill, a C below the crown that was the same C the brass key in Matthew’s pocket was stamped with.
The building was beautiful because it was built to make a woman believe the prison was a home.
Caleb pulled around to the residents’ entrance. He didn’t speak.
“Penelope is on the desk today,” Matthew said. “She’ll want to see your number. Show her. Don’t speak unless she speaks first.”
“And Amber.”
“Yes.”
“When you’re inside the apartment, you can put down whatever’s in your hand. The cameras don’t read the inside of a closed fist. They read the outside of an open one.”
The card was warm. My palm was sweating.
“Why are you telling me that?”
“Because I want you to trust me. Trust is faster when you give a person a small thing first. I’m giving you the small thing. The small thing is real. There is a blind spot in the cameras. The inside of your closed hand. I’m giving you that.”
Caleb didn’t say goodbye. He held my eyes in the mirror for a second, then let them go.
Matthew got out. He came around and opened my door for me, careful, kind. A doctor helping a patient.
The woman behind the desk had a stillness that takes years to learn, honey hair pinned in a chignon, lipstick in a shade chosen to signal taste rather than warmth.
She received me like something she had been told to expect.
“Welcome home, Ms. Vale.”
Amber in the car. Amber on the chart. Ms. Vale to a woman who’d never met me and already knew exactly which one to use. Three names in one day, and I couldn’t have told you yet which one, if any of them, was going to end up being mine.
“Show me your wrist, sweetheart.”
I showed her. She read the number off a tablet, no hand required.
His hand hadn’t been required either. He’d wanted it anyway.
She turned a tablet toward me. My number was already there.
Mine was at the top of a column of names that ran down the screen.
Each name reduced to two digits. The digits got smaller the farther down they went.
I knew I was not the only one. I knew the top was where they all started.
“Ninety-five. That’s a beautiful first number. Welcome to Crownhill.”
Inside the elevator, Matthew pressed six. The doors closed.
He smiled. Not the discharge-room restraint. Something else. The elevator smile. That was what I would call it later, when I had enough of them filed to see the pattern. This one said: we are between floors and the cameras are watching and I am not performing for either of us.
The elevator was small enough that I could feel the heat coming off him without meaning to notice it, six floors of nowhere else to look but at the numbers climbing or at him, and I kept choosing the numbers and losing.
A framed card on the panel: CROWNHILL RESIDENCES: Where recovery is not an end, but a beginning. Below it: Adherence above 88 required for unaccompanied elevator use.
The buttons went up. One through six had numbers. Seven and above had no numbers, just blank circles.
The apartment was on the sixth floor. The door read 6B. Matthew opened it with a brass key. An actual brass key. In a building where everything was digital, he had a physical thing that could open doors without a trace.
He put the key back in his pocket. “The apartment’s yours. For now.”
The apartment had no smell of food. It had the particular blankness of a hotel room between guests, the kind that makes you check the closets before you believe no one else is staying here too. Food arrived from outside and was cleared again before it could leave a mark on the air.
The apartment was the color of cream and the size of my mother’s whole house.
The cashmere on the hook. The books on the shelf. I knew they would be the books a man who had studied my patterns would order in advance, and knowing it didn’t make me want them less.
There was a kitchen with a quartz island. Not yellow. Not the kitchen I grew up in.
I put my hand on my stomach. The muscle memory was the oldest thing in this apartment and the second-oldest thing in my body. The oldest was the count.
“Amber?”
“Yes.”
“You went somewhere.”
“I came back.”
He smiled. Finally. He pulled the door toward himself and paused at the half-closed.
“One more thing. There is a phrase you’ll hear from the other residents. The phrase is safety tastes like surrender. They say it like a joke. It is not a joke. It is the building’s actual position. Think about it tonight. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”
He held the look a second past where the sentence needed it, his voice gone quieter than the room required, like he was checking a reading the band couldn’t give him. I wanted him to stay until he found it. I didn’t say so. Saying so would have cost me something he would never have to pay.
He closed the door.
The lock engaged. Not the deadbolt. Something quieter. Something I could not see.
The apartment was the quietest place I had ever stood in.
I went into the bathroom, the only room without a camera.
I opened my hand.
The card was cream-colored. The print was small and clean.
Dr. Irene Callow
If you are reading this, you have between four and six weeks. Do not tell him you have it. Do not tell anyone you have it. The seam in the cameras is real. He is not lying about that. He is lying about almost everything else.
A woman in a white coat had pressed it into my hand on the way out of the clinic, fast, while no one was looking. She had broken a rule to put it in my palm. That was the part I held onto. Someone had broken a rule for me.
I sat on the closed lid of the toilet. I held the card. I counted the tiles between my feet. One, two, three, four, five, six.
Then the breath. The seven was the conditioning that felt like freedom because it was the only choice left.
What frightened me was that I wanted it to be mine. That I had started wanting the seven. That I had started breathing to a rhythm that meant he was the only one who had ever noticed I knew the number.
The band on my wrist was where his fingers had been. The number on the band said 95.
Safety tastes like surrender.
He had given me the seam in the cameras because he wanted me to trust him.
The worst thought was the one I couldn’t put down: that the rule Dr. Irene Callow broke for me had not been broken at all.
That she had followed it. That the card was not something he had failed to catch.
It was a door he had left open. She had not broken a rule for me. She had been bait.
I counted to seven anyway.