The bedroom is too bright.
Anna must have opened the curtains at some point—probably when she brought in the tray of food I didn’t touch—and now afternoon light floods through the floor-to-ceiling windows.
I’ve been lying in bed for days.
I hate myself for it with a specific, focused hatred I recognize from only a few other particularly low points in my life.
My whole life I’ve been the woman who gets back up after she falls. Lost the shop because Z put us into debt that fucked all my savings, credit, and ability to continue my lease? Get back up. Car repossessed? Get back up and figure it out.
I have clawed my way back from nothing enough times that the scars have scars. Getting back up is the one thing I havealwaysbeen able to do.
Except my body has apparently decided to stop cooperating.
When the soft knock comes, I don’t answer, but the door opens anyway. The woman who steps in is not Anna. She looksfamiliar, but I’m not sure from where. She’s pretty in an unfussy way—dark red curls, minimal makeup, and the kind of calm that reads as professional rather than performed.
“Harper. I’m Kira, Isaak’s wife. Remember me? We met at Helen’s memorial?”
I give a noncommittal shrug and go back to staring at the wall.
“I’m a therapist. May I sit with you for a bit?”
“Sure,” I say in a monotone. “It’s not like I’m going anywhere.”
She pulls a chair to the bedside and sits without making a production of it, setting a leather bag on the floor. She doesn’t open the bag or pull out a notepad. She just sits with her hands in her lap and looks at me as if she has all the time in the world.
“Domhnall mentioned you’ve been having a hard time,” she says.
“That’s one way to put it,” I sigh, my entire body feeling heavy as lead.
“How would you put it?”
The question catches me sideways.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know anything anymore. I feel like the floor dropped out from under me.”
She nods. “Tell me about that. What was the floor like before it dropped?”
I close my eyes, and I’m sixteen years old, sitting on Z’s ratty couch while Frank works the night shift and my mom is past conscious on the other side of the trailer park. We’re eating cereal for dinner and he’s telling me about a motorcycle he saw, his eyes all lit up with that certain light he’d get when he thought about getting out.
He’s my one safe place.
If Mom’s latest boyfriend is sniffing around the door and the house smells like cigarettes and tequila bottles, there’s alwaysone place I can go. Z’s room. Surrounded by Z’s certainty that we’re going to get the hell out of here one day.
I swallow hard, then look up at the redhead. Then back at the wall.
For a long time I don’t say anything. Then I try, stumbling over my words, to explain the situation. I start with the last few days and she listens, asking questions here and there.
She’s a good listener. And maybe I did need to talk to someone after all, because suddenly it’s pouring out.
“Z was my only safe place for a long time,” I finally say after maybe fifteen minutes, and my voice comes out rough. “When I had no one and nowhere, there was him. He used to say it was me and him against the world, and I believed that. I believed it all the way deep down.”
“And now that’s gone,” she says gently.
“Worse. Now I found out it was never real.” The words taste like copper pennies.
“He lied. He spent ten years manipulating me so carefully that I couldn’t see it—” My voice breaks off in a choke at all the shocking revelations that have hit me in waves the past few days. “He made sure I stayed small enough that I’d never look too hard or ask too many questions. Or feel like I deserved more than what he was giving me.”
My hands find the edge of the duvet, and I’m pressing my thumbs into the fabric hard enough to feel the seam. “And I let him. I can’t get past that part. Ilethim do most of it.”