Page 46

“Sloane. Wake up.”

Her eyes opened. For half a second they were still somewhere else, still fixed on whatever had been standing over her, and then they found him and something in her chest seemed to collapse inward. She scrambled back against the headboard so fast the frame knocked into the wall.

“Hey. It’s me. You’re safe.”

Her breath was still tearing in and out of her. Sweat had soaked through the collar of her shirt. Her hands were pressed flat against the mattress like she was holding herself down.

“Get out.”

“Sloane.”

“I said get out.” Her voice cracked on the second word, and she hated that. He could see her hate it, could see the fury she turned on herself for the crack replace whatever had been on her face a moment before. “I don’t need you standing over my bed. I’m fine.”

“You weren’t fine ten seconds ago.”

“I’m fine now.” She pulled the sheet up over her knees like a wall. “Go back to bed.”

“Talk to me. Tell me what it was.”

“It was nothing. It’s over.” Her jaw worked, and she looked past him at the door instead of at him. “I don’t want an audience for this. I never asked for one.”

The words landed harder than he expected. He’d sat across from her while she told him about a locked drawer full of her father’s handwriting, about an aunt who couldn’t look at her, about the day she stood in a doorway glad to watch a man dragged away in chains. He’d thought something had shifted between them. He’d thought the wall had a door in it now.

He stood slowly, so he wouldn’t spook her further.

“Okay,” he agreed softly. Carefully.

She didn’t answer. She was already turning away from him, curling onto her side with her back to the room, her shoulders drawn up around her ears.

He walked to the door. Stopped in the frame.

“I’ll be right outside,” he said. “You don’t have to talk to me. I’m not leaving the hall.”

“Suit yourself.”

He pulled the door most of the way shut and left it open a crack, because closing it all the way felt like something he couldn’t make himself do. In the sitting room, he dragged the wooden chair from the kitchen table into the corridor, set it against the wall across from her door, and sat.

The bond still carried the tail end of her fear, fading now, replaced by something quieter and more familiar. Shame. He recognized the frequency of it. He’d felt it from her before, in smaller doses, whenever she caught herself wanting something she didn’t think she was allowed to want.

He stayed in the chair.

The corridor was cold. He didn’t get up for a blanket. He watched the strip of moonlight travel across the floorboards, watched it shorten and then vanish as the moon dropped behind the ridge. Somewhere past two, her breathing through the door settled into something even. He let his shoulders drop half an inch and kept his eyes open.

He thought about what she’d said at the table the night before. I had myself. That was enough. He thought about the years that statement was covering, the two decades of a girl who woke in the dark and pressed her own hands over her own mouth so nobody would hear her afraid. He thought about how she’d built a life where asking for anything was a weakness she couldn’t survive, and how tonight, when the nightmare had her by the throat, the only thing she knew how to do was send away the one person who’d come running.

He didn’t blame her for it. He understood it too well to blame her for it, and understanding it didn’t make it hurt less.

The bathroom door creaked at some point after three. He came half out of the chair before his mind caught up, and by the time he was fully awake, she was already in the hall, in an old shirt that hung to her thighs, her hair loose around her face for once instead of pulled back.

She stopped when she saw him.

Neither of them spoke. She looked at the chair, at the angle of it facing her door, and something crossed her face that he couldn’t name fast enough to catch. Not annoyance. Not quite gratitude either. Something caught between the two, unresolved, the same place she seemed to live in most of the time.

She went into the kitchen. He heard the tap run, heard a glass fill, heard her drink it standing at the counter the way she always drank things standing up. When she came back down the hall, she slowed by the chair.

He looked up at her. She looked down at him. The bond sat quiet and warm between them, saying nothing that words could have said better.

She went into her room and closed the door. Not all the way. He heard it stop an inch short of the frame, and he understood that for what it was, and he stayed where he was until the light came up grey over the mountains.