The room is dark except for the streetlight coming through the gap in the curtain. She is in bed, tangled in the duvet, her body rigid with tension of someone fighting the inside of their own skull. She makes the sound again, that awful, small, trapped sound, and her hands fist in the sheet.
I cross the room.
I don’t turn on the light. I sit on the edge of the bed, and I say her name once, very quietly, in the register I use when I need to be heard through distance.
“Amy.”
She startles. Eyes open, unseeing for a moment, the lag of a person surfacing from somewhere deep.
She blinks, and her focus is on me.
Her breathing is ragged. Her face is damp. She is looking at me with the disorientation of someone trying to reconcile the inside of the nightmare with the outside of the room, so I wait. I’m very good at waiting while she does the work of separating them.
“Saint,” she says, like I’m the string that pulls her out.
“I’m here,” I say.
She closes her eyes. Opens them again. “Here,” she repeats, quieter, like she’s confirming it.
She’s shaking. Fine tremors through her shoulders, the kind the body produces when the adrenaline has nowhere to go. I have felt this from the inside. I know what it needs.
I reach out, and I put my hand over hers where they’re fisted in the sheet. Not pulling. Not restraining. Just weight. Just warmth.
She exhales.
The shaking doesn’t stop immediately, but it changes character, losing the frantic edge and settling into something the body can manage.
She breathes more deliberately now, in the long, controlled intervals I’ve watched her practice a hundred times without knowing I was watching.
I count her breaths with her.
After a while, she says, “Don’t go.”
Two words. Quietly. Without looking at me.
“I won’t if you don’t want me to,” I say.
She turns her hand over under mine. Not holding. Open. Palm up.
An offering, a permission, or something in between.
The nightmare doesn’t come back.
Eventually, her breathing evens out entirely, and the tremors stop. She is still, and the room is quiet around us.
I sit at the edge of her bed in the dark with her hand open under mine, and I look at the ceiling, and I think about what Azriel said.
Whatever you are to her is going to matter.
I think about her hand on my chest in the doorway. The weight of it. The warmth.
I look at her in the dark.
Her face is slack now, unguarded in the way sleep makes everyone unguarded, the performance stripped away. She looks like someone who has been holding something very heavy for a very long time and, in this moment, has been allowed to put it down.
I am going to burn down every single thing that ever made her feel like she had to carry it alone.
The thought arrives with the quiet certainty of a fact rather than a decision.