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My throat hurts when I swallow. I do it again anyway. My scalp only hurts when my hair shifts. I turn my head once, just to feel where she held me.

I should have kept my mouth shut. What the fuck did I expect her to do? Stop because I asked? Explain herself to me?

I’m at the threshold to her office. The forbidden room.

There are no cages or restraints or secret shelves full of photographs. There’s a desk with two monitors, a calculator and a stapler. Filing cabinets line one wall. A calendar beside the computer has tiny handwriting filling several squares. There’s a printer in the corner with a package of paper stacked underneath it.

Heather kidnaps men and apparently also has opinions about toner.

I stay where I am.

She opens a closet beside the filing cabinets. “Bring me the shit.”

I cross into the room, holding my breath. Nothing happens when I cross the threshold. No ruler. No hand around my throat.

The razor goes onto a shelf. Then the cartridges, scissors, clippers, comb, and the stupid metal puzzle. I hand them over one at a time while Heather puts everything away.

My coat’s right there. It’s folded on the second shelf. My bag’s underneath it. My wallet is in there. My keys. My phone.

I forget about Simon’s deodorant in my hand.

She’s putting Simon’s toothpaste beside his razor as if she hasn’t just shown me where she keeps everything I arrived with.

“Deodorant.”

I give it to her.

She takes the toothbrush last. The closet closes. Heather turns the key in the lock and pulls it free.

I watch her cross the office and put the key on a small hook beside the door. It’s inside the office by less than a foot. My throat hurts again.

Heather turns off the office light. “Come on, Jamie.”

I step back so she can close the door. Then I follow her.

In the hallway she stops, turns, and holds out her hand. The last time she reached for me, I ended up against Simon’s wall with her fingers locked around my throat.

I put my hand in hers anyway. Her grip is light, and her thumb settles over my knuckles. My throat still hurts. Her thumb makes the hurt feel correctly placed.

She leads me past the kitchen to the playroom. The last time I was in here, it looked like a daycare. In the dark the stuffed animals watch from their shelves with glass eyes that catch what little light comes in from the hall.

Heather lets go of my hand and kneels in front of the dollhouse. She reaches behind it, and a light comes on inside the tiny kitchen. Then the little playroom beside it, with its own shelves and its own beanbag no bigger than my thumbnail. She climbs the house one switch at a time until the bedrooms glow. Above it all, on a shelf by itself, one doll sits alone in the dark.

A doll lies in the bed of the green room. It’s small enough to fit in my palm, dressed in dark trousers and a white shirt, his hair combed neatly back from his face. Tiny wire glasses sit a little crooked on his nose. His shirt’s been unbuttoned and left open. There’s a silver bead no bigger than a grain of rice with a thread of wire running through it on its chest.

The blue room walls are the same midnight blue as mine upstairs, and the ceiling is scattered with painted silver dots. There’s a tiny bed with tiny sheets, and a doll lies on top of them with long black hair spread across the pillow.

“Oh,” I say.

Heather opens the front of the house and lifts him out. She holds him in the cup of her hand the way she holds my face when she’s pleased with me, and smooths his hair with one fingertip. Then she digs through a basket under the dollhouse, past ribbons and brushes and tiny hangers, until she finds a small glass bottle, and she gives the doll one quick spray.

Vanilla fills the space between us. My scent. My whole body answers it like she said my name.

Heather lifts the doll to her face and breathes in. My throat won’t do anything except swallow.

She holds him out to me. “You can hold him.”

He weighs almost nothing. The black paint of his eyes has gone soft at the edges, as though a thumb has passed over them thousands of times. His clothes are new. He isn’t new at all.