Chapter Twenty
THE DOOR CLICKED shut behind him and I was alone with all of it.
The men who hurt me were dead. Had been dead for years.
My brother and the man I'd given myself to last night had hunted them through the dark and put them in the ground and then sat across from me, month after month, year after year, and let me believe the world still had teeth in it.
Every door I'd flinched at. Every night I'd lain rigid waiting for them to come back.
All of it could have been a little quieter, a little less, if either of the two men who said they loved me had been brave enough to give me one sentence.
And they hadn't. They'd handed me a cage and called the lock a kindness, all of them, every man who was ever supposed to be safe, right down to the last one I'd let all the way in.
I couldn't stay in that room. The sheets still smelled like him.
I got up and I got dressed with my hands shaking and I left the room.
The clubhouse was wrong now, the way a familiar face is wrong in a dream.
Every man I passed knew things about me I hadn't known about myself.
Maybe they all knew. Maybe the whole club had been in on the great kind project of keeping Beatrice in the dark for her own good.
I couldn't look at any of them. I couldn't look for Caleb, if I saw my brother's face right then, the same face that used to lean over my bed and promise me the dark couldn't have me, knowing now what those hands had done and hidden, I think something in me would have come apart that doesn't go back together.
I just wanted out. Out of the walls, out of the secrets, out into air that didn't have anybody's lie in it.
I was standing in the side hall by the kitchen door with my hand on the frame, trying to remember how to breathe, when Holly found me.
I braced for it, the cold look, the little knife she always had ready for me. But it didn't come. She stopped a few feet off and she looked at me, really looked, and something in her hard pretty face had gone soft and almost wrecked, like she was seeing something she recognized.
"Oh, honey," she said. "Look at you. You're falling apart."
I didn't have words. I just stood there shaking.
"I know we've never—" She stopped, started over, quieter.
"I know I haven't been kind to you. I'm not proud of it.
But I know that look. I've worn that look.
That's the look of a woman who just found out the men in this place will lie straight to her face and call it love.
" Her mouth twisted. "They do that. It's the one thing they're all good at.
And then they ride off to go be heroes somewhere and leave you standing in a hallway holding it. "
The part of me, the part I'd finally learned to trust, turned over once, a small wrongness, a note slightly off.
But it wasn't fear. There was nothing in her I could point at.
She wasn't a danger. She was just a woman being kind to me.
So the small off note sank back down under the flood of everything else, because there was nothing under it to hold it up.
"Come here, sit down before you go down.
" She took my elbow, gentle, steering me off the door frame and onto the little bench in the alcove by the kitchen and crouched in front of me with her hands warm on my knees.
"When's the last time you had a thing to eat or drink, honey?
You can't come apart on nothing. Nobody can.
Let me get you something. Stay right there. "
She was back before I'd finished shaking, with a mug, steam ghosting off the top of it, and she folded both my hands around it and held them shut until they could hold it on their own.
"Drink this. It's just tea, honey in it, good and sweet, it'll settle you.
My mother used to make it for me on the worst days of my life.
" Her voice had gone soft and low and almost undone, her eyes wet and shining, and some far-down part of me understood that whatever she believed was happening here, she believed it all the way to the bottom; it was costing her something to kneel on that floor.
It was hot and sweet and it did settle me, at first the shaking smoothed out, my shoulders came down from around my ears for the first time since the door clicked shut on Eli, and for a few breaths it was even a mercy, exactly the way she'd promised.
The morning went soft at its edges and drifted a little way off from me.
And then the drifting didn't stop.
"There now," Holly murmured, watching my face go loose, and something in her own eased, relieved, the way you let go of a breath when a frightened child finally takes the spoon.
"There. Better. Come on… up you come. No, lean into me, I've got you, I've got you.
Let's just get you somewhere quiet to lie down. "
I don't remember the door. I remember the white noon light hitting me flat across the face.
I remember Holly's arm gone hard around my waist, taking more and more of what I weighed, my own feet landing wrong and far away like they belonged to some other woman.
I remember a small car off away from the bikes, warm and close and smelling of cigarettes and pine, and Holly easing me down into it, not the front, the back, along the seat, my cheek to cold vinyl, and a blanket coming down over me, over my shoulder, up past my chin, tucked in soft as a lullaby.
"You stay right down under there and rest," she said, low, close to my ear.
And I understood it then, far down, through fathoms of warm gray water, the whole terrible shape of the thing. What had been out there in the dark for years didn't come for me wearing a threat's face. It never tripped a single bell. It came as someone gentle.
That was when the bell finally rang. Loud. Clanging. Up from the bottom of me where the truest things live. Wrong. This is wrong. Get up. Get out. Now.
And I tried.
I didn't just lie there and let it take me. I told my hand to throw off the blanket and claw for the door. I told my mouth to scream Eli’s name, to scream anybody's name.
I told my body to fight the way it hadn't fought four years ago under those trees, the way I'd sworn on my own life it always would from now on.
Nothing answered. The bell was screaming through a house with every wire cut.
I could feel the danger now, clear and whole and far, far too late, and I could not lift my own hand off the seat.
Whatever she'd put in that tea had reached all the way down into me and pulled the alarm clean loose from the body it was made to move, and left me wide awake at the bottom of myself, watching the world haul me off.
I felt the car slow, and roll. Sideways, through the gap beneath the blanket, I watched the top of our gate slide past the glass.
I heard a man call something easy and friendly to Holly, and Holly call it easy back, and a hand somewhere waved a thing through that belonged, waved her through, waved me through, hidden three feet from a man who would have laid his life down for me and never knew I was there.
Then the gate was behind us and the road came up gray and open and endless under the wheels.
"There," Holly breathed, easy now, and happy, and so sure she was saving me.
"Worst part's behind us. You rest, honey.
He's going to take such good care of you, better than any of these lying men ever did.
He told me all about you. He said you've been carrying your fear so long you've forgotten how to set it down.
And where I'm taking you, you finally get to. For good."
Where I'm taking you.
I tried to scream Eli's name. It came out of me as nothing. As breath. As fog.
And the last thing I had, before the dark came all the way up and closed over the top of my mind, was one clear thought, sharp as a shard of glass in all that softness, the truest thing my body had always known and had finally, finally been right about:
Somewhere at the end of this road, the one from the dark was waiting for me.
And nobody who loved me knew which road it was.
***
I CAME UP through the fog the way you come up from deep water, slow, with the light getting brighter and farther away at the same time, and I broke the surface into a room I had never seen.
It was clean. That was the first wrong thing my drowned mind could hold onto, how clean it was, how quiet, how cared for.
Soft gray walls. A window with a blind drawn most of the way down on a flat brown nothing of land.
A narrow bed under me with a rail along one side, and the smell of the place was the smell I knew better than my own name, the smell of four years of my life: antiseptic and clean linen and that particular nothing smell of a room where things are done to you for your own good.
For one swimming moment I thought I was back.
I thought the rescue had been the dream and the hospital was the waking, and grief opened up in me so wide I could have drowned in it all over again.
I tried to lift my hand. It came up off the blanket maybe an inch and dropped, heavy as a sandbag, the muscles in it answering me from a long way off, through deep water, through whatever Holly's tea had poured into the wiring of me.
I couldn't make my body mine. I could only lie there and breathe and look.
And then I knew I wasn't alone.
There was a man sitting in a chair beside the bed. He'd been there the whole time, still, patient, his hands folded in his lap, watching me surface, and when my eyes found him a small kind warmth moved over his tired ordinary face.
"There she is," he said gently. "Welcome back, Beatrice. Take your time. There's no hurry now. There's no hurry at all anymore."
Dr. Reed.