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Cash and I look up at the same time. Eyes locked.
Then in unison, "She's at the silo!"
CHAPTER 4
Turn around. I brought you some pie.
The words don't move. They just sit there on the glass like they were always going to be there, like they were carved into the screen before I even picked up the phone.
Turn around. I brought you some pie.
My stomach folds in half.
A deep, muscular, involuntary sickening. Like my body remembers before my brain catches up.
The cherry filling.
The lattice crust in that white Ashby Ranch bakery box.
The too-sweet smell of it.
And… the zip ties.
I can feel them. Right now, this second, the phantom bite of plastic cutting into my wrist bones as I twisted, and twisted, and the skin went raw, and then wet and Marcus just—sat there. Watching. Legs crossed. Patient. Like I was a horse working itself tired against a fence.
Open wide.
His voice wasn't angry, it was the patient kind of tender that comes only in psychosis.
Then, like I’m still there, the fork is coming toward my mouth, the cherry filling dripping off the tines.
It drips onto my bare breast. Sliding over my nipple—
NO!
I wasn't wearing underwear. He'd taken them off because he'd—
NO!
—because he washed me.
Inside.
While I was unconscious he put his hands inside my body and cleaned me out like I was a thing that needed to be emptied before it could be refilled and he told me about it afterward like he was telling me he'd drawn a bath.
He was both casual and proud of it.
I washed away all traces of him.
The catheter tubing coiled on the nightstand like a sleeping snake and I didn't even know what it was at first, I thought it was an IV, I thought maybe I'd been sick, and then he explained what it was for and where it had been and my whole body tried to leave itself—tried to just go somewhere else, anywhere, the ceiling, the photographs on the wall, the little girl in the blue ribbon at six years old who didn't know yet what her life was going to cost her.
Good girl.
I take good care of what's mine.
The bendy straw. The pills dissolving on my tongue. His hand on my bare thigh, just resting there, thumb moving in a slow circle like he was soothing a dog, and the photographs of me everywhere—every wall, every surface—and him tending them like altars, adjusting frames, wiping dust, murmuring about how pretty I was at twelve, at sixteen, and the cherry pie sitting between us like a sacrament.
My hands are shaking so hard the phone almost falls.
