“Did you?” Kira’s voice is neutral, not challenging.
“I should have seen it,” I say bitterly. “The way I was raised? I should have seen it a mile off. Mydadwas a con man, for fuck’s sake.”
“What would seeing it have required of you?”
“I don’t—” I stop, confused. “What do you mean?”
“You said youlethim. I’m asking what it would have taken, specifically, for you to have seen it sooner. What would that version of Harper have needed that you didn’t have?”
The question sits there and I don’t know what to do with it.
“Evidence,” I say finally. “I would have needed evidence. I’m not the kind of person who throws away ten years on afeeling.”
“But he made sure you didn’t have evidence.”
“He made sure I didn’t have evidence,” I repeat, and something in the repetition of it, in hearing it as a sentence about his behavior rather than my failure… it does something I wasn’t expecting.
My throat feels tight. “That’s—yes. That’s exactly what he did.”
“That’s called coercive control,” Kira says plainly. “It’s not a character flaw in the person it’s done to. It’s a deliberate strategy. It works precisely because it targets people who are loyal and give the benefit of the doubt to those they love.”
I press my thumbs harder into the seam of the duvet.
“Is there something more?” Kira asks, and her voice shifts register, very slightly. Not harder, but more precise. Like she’s adjusting an instrument. “Something you haven’t been able to say out loud yet?”
I don’t answer.
“In my experience,” she says, “when someone survives what you’ve survived, there’s usually a specific thing. Not the big narrative thing—not the betrayal or the gun he held on you or even the years of control. I’m talking about the thing that was always underneath.”
The room is very quiet.
Outside, distantly, I can hear Bruiser’s high-pitched laughter echoing. His laugh, which has always been the sound that pulls me back from the edge.
Kira’s silence is the loudest thing I’ve heard in days.
Not because she says the word I suspect we’re both thinking. She doesn’t. She just goes on to ask, very quietly, what I would call it if it had happened to someone else. A best friend, maybe.
If I was sitting where she’s sitting and a woman told me that story of the hotel room, the repetitive shots in a plastic cup tipped to her lips, and the moment she went under—what word would I use?
I stare through the window and I don’t answer.
“Harper.”
“I’m thinking,” I say.
“Take your time.”
The thing about Kira is that she means it. She’s not running a clock on me. She is sitting in that cushioned chair with the patience of someone who has done this enough times to understand that the answer will come when it comes. Maybe it’s like a broken bone knitting itself back together—you can want it done faster all you like, but the tissue doesn’t give a shit what you want.
I’ve been calling it bad sex for ten years.
That first time, it was just bad sex I was too drunk to remember. And it was my fault. We were homeless and I got drunk. And he’d been taking care of me and I owed him something for that, didn’t I?
After that, it was just bad sex that happened and then kept happening.
Eventually, I quietly enforced the one boundary I could manage—condom—and called that self-preservation and moved on giving him what he wanted. What I still owed him.
A loving partner would give her body to fuck however he wanted after he got home from those long hauls. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I felt like it was my fault for not loving him the way he wanted.