"It's nothing. I bumped a shelf."
"Robin."
"I'm clumsy. You know I'm clumsy. I burn myself twice a week."
"Let me see your arm."
The bar goes on around us. Jason's laughing at something Ash said. Toby and Knox are in the armchair. Silas is reading. Nobody's watching us.
I could refuse. I could pull away, change the subject, go to the bathroom, leave. I could perform my way out of this the way I've performed my way out of everything.
But Vaughn's eyes are steady and serious and he's not going to stop asking.
I push up my sleeve.
The bruise is vivid. Purple and yellow and shaped exactly like a pan handle, stark against my pale skin. There's no mistaking it for a shelf bump. There's no mistaking it for anything other than what it is — an impact bruise from an object swung with force.
Vaughn looks at it.
His face does something I've never seen before. Not anger — something colder. The expression of a man who's looking at evidence and drawing conclusions and every conclusion is making him want to destroy something.
"Robin." His voice is quiet. Controlled. The control costs him — I can see it in the tightness of his jaw, the way his hand trembles once before going still. "Who did that to you?"
Not a question. A demand.
"It was an accident. He threw it at the wall and his aim was off."
"He threw something at a wall near you and it hit you."
"It's not as bad as it—"
"Who."
"Gordon. It was — Vaughn, it was an accident. He didn't mean—"
"He threw a pan at you."
"AT THE WALL. At the wall, and it hit me, and it was an accident, and he didn't even — it's the industry, Vaughn. Kitchens are—"
"If you say 'kitchens are like that' I'm going to lose my mind."
"Well, they are! You don't work in one. You don't know what it's like. Chefs throw things. They scream. They're under pressure and they react and sometimes—"
"Sometimes they hit you." His voice hasn't risen. It's gotten quieter, which is worse. "Robin, that's a pan handle bruise on your arm. Your boss threw a cooking implement and it hit you hard enough to leave a mark. That's not the industry. That's not pressure. That's abuse."
The word fills the space between us like smoke.
"Don't." My voice shakes. "Don't call it that."
"What should I call it?"
"A bad day. A boss with a temper. A hazard of the profession. Call it whatever you want, but don't call it that, because if you call it that then the last years of my life are—"
I stop. Close my eyes.
If he calls it that, then the last years of my life are something I chose to endure. Something I could have left. Something I stayed in because I was too scared or too loyal or too broken to walk away. And that makes me — what? Complicit? Stupid? My mother, staying with my father through twenty years of screaming matches because she thought she couldn't do better?
"Robin."