Black Out_A Novel

32

Detective Harrison was feeling like a man who’d escaped a terminal diagnosis; he was positively giddy with relief. Since Gray had paid off Harrison’s debtors and he’d enrolled himself in Gamblers Anonymous, he felt lighter than he had in years. The threatening phone calls ceased, and the terrifying photographs of his wife and child stopped arriving on his desk. He’d stopped puking up blood from his ulcer.

A year ago if anyone had told him he’d be in a twelve-step program, he’d have punched that person in the jaw. But the weekly confessions in the meeting room of a local church by the beach cleansed him. He could say the things he’d done (most of them, anyway), and he could listen to others who’d done much, much worse, who’d hit rock bottom so hard they barely got back up. He wasn’t alone. He wasn’t even the worst of the bunch.

He could make love to his wife again for the first time in months. He didn’t feel that awful clenching of guilt and fear in his stomach every time he looked into the face of his infant daughter, Emily. And more than all of this, he remembered what it was like to be a cop, a good cop, the only thing he had ever wanted to be. He approached his job now with the zeal of the converted. And indeed he felt baptized, renewed.

He was experiencing the euphoria of someone snatched from the consequences of his actions. And if he still had the itch to gamble, if he still felt a restless agitation at the sound of a game, any game, in progress—on the radio, on the station-house television—if he still hadn’t been quite able to delete his bookie’s number from his cell phone, he told himself these things could take a while.

In the meantime he had the biggest case of his career to occupy his attention, the one he’d decided would be his redemption as a police officer. Two grisly homicides connected by one woman who was lying about her identity. Of course, that was the part he had to keep to himself, as per his arrangement with Gray. So Harrison was working overtime to find another connection between Simon Briggs and Paul Brown. He knew he’d find it. He was a dog with a bone.

And then I died. When he heard the news and was called to investigate the scene of the diving accident, he enjoyed a secret smile inside. Not that he’d hated me or wished me ill—quite the opposite. In spite of everything, he’d liked me quite a bit. Even so, Detective Harrison didn’t grieve for me as he investigated my suspicious death. Somehow he knew better.

Like the good cop he wanted to be, he walked the grid around the sinkhole, searched my belongings and my car. But when he found the envelope I’d taken from Briggs’s car, he never entered it into evidence. He shoved it inside his jacket and then hid it beneath the seat of his own car without anyone seeing.

He dutifully interviewed my bereft family and friends.

“I don’t know why she would do it,” Ella wept to him at her kitchen table. “She was terrified of the water. I wish I’d tried to stop her. I was trying to be supportive.”

Detective Harrison offered her a comforting pat on the shoulder, thinking that, even upset, she was a very attractive woman.

“She was my friend, you know. My friend. That means something in this awful world. It means a lot.”

“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Singer. I really am.”

“Do you think they’ll find her body?” she asked, wiping her eyes. She was having trouble speaking between shuddering breaths. “I couldn’t stand it if they never found her.”

“I don’t know, ma’am. It’s hard to say with those caves. The divers haven’t found anything yet.”

“Doesn’t it seem like there’s nothing to it but pain and disappointment?” she asked him. “Sometimes doesn’t it seem that way?”

“What do you mean?” he asked gently, thinking she was too beautiful and rich to be so unhappy.

“I mean life, Detective. Sometimes it’s all too hard.”

She lost it then, folded her arms across the table and laid her head upon them and sobbed. My poor, dear friend. He sat with her, a hand on her back. He’d been there before so many, many times. He didn’t feel awkward or uncomfortable. He empathized, and he stayed until she was better.

Ella’s grief, her self-blame, the pain she was in—these were all palpable, completely sincere in his estimation. My husband, on the other hand, was not as convincing, though he looked drawn and tired when Detective Harrison paid him a visit in the days after my car was found.

“Why would she dive like that if she was so afraid of the water?” the detective asked Gray. “Everyone—her friend, even her instructor—says how afraid she was of the water. Scuba diving seems like an odd choice of hobby for someone who wasn’t even comfortable in the pool.”

Gray shook his head. “Annie was a stubborn woman. She got it into her head that she wanted to conquer her fear of the water, for Victory. She didn’t want Victory to see her giving in to her fear. When she got something into her head, there was no getting it out.”

The detective nodded. The whole interview was a charade, of course, both of them knowing that Harrison’s hands were tied by what had passed between them. This went unspoken, each of them playing his role.

Harrison looked around the house just to say he did, poking through the dark, empty rooms with Gray right behind him. What he was looking for, he wasn’t sure.

“Where’s your daughter?” Harrison asked as he was leaving.

Gray issued a sigh and rubbed his eyes. “I sent her away with her grandparents. They’re on a cruise to the Caribbean. I don’t want her to be touched by this yet. I don’t know how to tell her.”

It seemed like a reasonable thing to do. But Detective Harrison knew a liar when he saw one. Gray Powers was a man with a lot to hide, and the strain on him was obvious. But he was not a man grieving the loss of a wife. The death of a loved one hollows people out, leaves them with an empty, dazed look that’s hard to fake. People mourning a loss might weep inconsolably like Ella, or rage and scream, or they might sink into themselves, go blank. As their minds are scrambling to process the meaning of death, they act in all kinds of crazy and unpredictable ways. But in Detective Harrison’s opinion, Gray didn’t have that confused, unhinged quality he’d seen so many times before.

“Wasn’t there a maid?” asked the detective as he stepped out the front door.

“I gave her some time off while Victory is away.”

“I’d like to talk to her.”

“Of course,” said Gray. He disappeared for a minute, then returned with a number and address scribbled on a sticky note. “She’s staying with her sister.”

In the doorway the two men faced each other.

“I’m sorry for your loss, Mr. Powers,” the detective said with a half smile, just the lightest hint of sarcasm in his voice. But if Gray registered the detective’s expression or tone, he didn’t acknowledge it at all.

“Thank you,” Gray said with a nod, and closed the door.

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“Where’d you go, Ophelia? Who are you running from?” Harrison said aloud to himself as he drove through the gated community where I used to live, admiring the houses he could never dream of affording. He watched the neighborhood kids riding on their expensive bikes. He noted the gleaming bodies of the late-model Benzes and Beemers. He felt a tiny itch he wouldn’t dare acknowledge. He focused instead on the matter at hand, the fact that he had not for one second believed I was dead. He was certain I was still alive. If he were still a betting man, he’d have staked his life on it.



33

I am pain. I am nothing but the agony of my body and mind. I don’t know how long I’ve been alternating between total darkness and blinding white light, silence and the booming voice asking questions I can’t answer. I might have been here for hours or days. It’s dark now, and I take comfort in it, though my body is numb from the inch of freezing water in which I lie. I am shivering uncontrollably, my jaw clenched.

A rectangle of light opens in the wall and a man, small and lean, walks through a doorway I didn’t know was there. His footfalls echo off the metal surfaces, and he comes to a stop about an inch from my body. I can’t see his face. The lights come up then, less harsh than before, but still I have to close my eyes, open them to slits, then close them again. I do this several times before I am acclimated to the light.

His face is distantly familiar, angular and deeply lined. His eyes are small and watery, his lips dry and pulled tight. But he’s not Marlowe.

“This can end. It can be over for you,” he says to the wall. He doesn’t want to look at me, out of either pity or disgust. I struggle to stand, and I feel a wave of light-headedness so severe I almost black out.

“Just tell me where he is, Ophelia,” he says, his voice reasonable and tired.

I am confused, disoriented. I don’t know why he thinks I know where Marlowe Geary is. But I can’t say any of this. I just can’t make the words come out. He stands there for I don’t know how long, looking at the wall. I think he’ll move to hurt me, to kick me where I lie. But he doesn’t. He just stands there.

“I don’t know,” I finally manage. “I swear to you. I don’t know where he is.” My voice is little more than a desperate croak.

He rubs his temples in a gesture of fatigue. I am straining to remember his face.

“Annie Fowler may not know. But Ophelia March does,” he says softly, almost kindly. His eyes are flint. “She knows.”

“No,” I say. “No. I don’t remember.” I try to keep myself from sobbing in front of him, but I can’t. I am desperately searching my newly recovered memories. Is it possible that somewhere inside the maze of my shattered psyche I know where Marlowe has been all these years? I chase it, but it turns corners fast, slips away from me. If I could catch it, I would. I would.

“I don’t want to hurt you any more, Ophelia,” he says.

“Don’t,” I answer, more out of desperation than anything else.

His whole body goes rigid. He drops to his knees into the cold water and puts his face, red and pulled like taffy with his rage, next to mine. I can smell his breath as he whispers ferociously in my ear, “Then tell me what I want to know, Ophelia.”

I recognize him then. He’s the Angry Man, one of the protesters that waited on the road outside the horse farm, the one that threw a rock at our car that day. My brain doesn’t know what to do with this. I struggle to get up, to get away from him, even as my mind is struggling to put this piece of information into one of the blank spaces of my life. But it’s too much. I black out.


When I come to again, the Angry Man is gone. The lights are still on. I sit up with effort and look around the room. There’s nothing to see but metal walls and a photograph left by my feet. I pick it up. It’s a picture of Victory, my baby, my little girl. Her eyes are closed, her face a ghostly white. Her blond curls fan around her face like the light cast from a halo. There’s a piece of black tape over her mouth, and her hands are bound behind her. She looks impossibly small and fragile.

Every rational thought I have left in my head deserts me, and I start to scream. It’s a guttural wail that seems to come from someplace primal within me; it’s involuntary, rips through me. I’ve heard this sound before so many times in my worst nightmares, my memories of Janet Parker. I pull myself from the floor and go over to pound on the door.

The voice booms through the speakers I can see now on the ceiling.

“Let’s start again. Where’s Marlowe Geary?”



34

Ray Harrison lived another life after his wife and daughter went to bed. When they were awake, he was centered, rooted in his life by his love for them. But when they both slept, a strange restlessness awoke within him, an almost physical tingling in his hands and legs. It was something he wouldn’t have been able to explain, even if he wanted to. And he didn’t.

The silence of the nighttime house, as Sarah called it—the dimmed lights in the kitchen, the hum of the baby monitor, the television volume so low he could barely hear it—caused him to connect with a hole inside himself, a place that needed to be filled. These were the hours when he had first found himself on the phone to his bookie, betting ridiculous sums on games he was assured were a lock. These were the hours when he sat riveted to the screen—always with the same feeling of stunned incredulity—as the quarterback with the bad knee made the impossible touchdown, as the horse who couldn’t lose stumbled and fell, as the pitcher with the bad arm threw a perfect game. It felt personal sometimes, it really did. As if something were conspiring on a cosmic level to f*ck him until he bled.

So many nights he almost woke Sarah to tell her what he’d done to their life. But then he’d go to her and see that she was asleep so soundly, so peacefully, that he’d lose his nerve and just get into bed beside her. Her trust in him was total. She wasn’t one of those wives who called the station to see if he really was working overtime, who went over his pay stubs to check his hours against the tally she was keeping on the sly. She let him handle all their money, all the business of their life together. She never even looked at the accounts online. She wasn’t a woman who needed control. She was a woman who’d needed a baby and a home and a husband she trusted. He’d been able to give her all those things, easily, willingly.

Then he’d almost destroyed her, without her ever even suspecting. Every time he thought about it, a shudder moved through him and his face would flush with shame. His escape from the total decimation of his life was narrow. He came so close he could feel it like the rush of a freight train.

He found himself oddly grateful for me, the woman he knew as Annie Powers. If it hadn’t been for me, he strongly suspected that he’d be dead or that he would have lost the only two people who meant anything to him. And now he found himself using those hours, that terrible restlessness, to work his case, to find out what happened to the mysterious woman who, without meaning to, had saved him.

He kept a cramped office off the kitchen where the large walk-in pantry used to be. There was a small desk, a creaky chair, and a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling that he turned off and on with a string. He had an old computer that was slow and loud and badly needed replacing, but he could still use it to access the Internet through his dialup connection.

On the night after he’d talked to Gray, while Sarah and Emily slept, he sifted through the contents of the envelope he’d found in my car. He had known immediately that it had belonged to Simon Briggs; his handwriting was a distinctive loopy cursive that looked like it belonged to a child—a deranged and very stupid child. He’d seen it on other items recovered from Briggs’s car. With its big, faltering O’s and wobbly L’s, his handwriting was oddly precise, as though he had copied each letter from a chalkboard in front of him. The envelope also carried an odor of cigar smoke, a scent that had permeated Briggs’s other belongings.

It contained mainly printouts from articles Harrison himself had already read on the Internet. They were arranged neatly in chronological order, beginning with the article about the fire and murder at the horse ranch. Then there were articles detailing our flight across the country, the crimes Marlowe was suspected of committing, and our eventual death.

There were photographs, stills taken by security cameras at convenience stores and gas stations across the country. Some of them were grisly, some of them grainy and with blurry images impossible to discern. And so many of them were of Ophelia, a haunted, broken-looking young woman. Harrison could barely connect her to me. One shot in particular moved him, disturbed him more than any other. Marlowe and I were captured in conversation, a woman’s body on the floor beside us, violated and damaged in ways too unspeakable to describe. Harrison looked at my face and saw an expression he recognized; he’d seen the expression on Sarah’s face when she looked at him. It was a look of the purest and most profound love, a love that stood witness to every sin and endured just the same.


I’m still lying in a pool of water, but I’ve stopped feeling the cold.

“The notion of romantic love is wrongheaded,” the doctor tells me. He sits cross-legged in the corner of my metal room. His voice echoes, wet and tinny, off the walls and ceiling.

“Human beings love the thing that tells them what they want to believe about themselves. If at your core you believe that you are worthless, you will love the person who treats you that way. That’s why you were able to love Marlowe the way you did.”

“Because I thought I was worthless?”

“Didn’t you? Isn’t that what your parents taught you by word or by deed? If not worthless, then at least negligible?”

“But he didn’t treat me as though I was worthless.”

“Not at first. They never do at first. Few people hate themselves so much, or so close to the surface, that they accept abuse right off the bat. If he’d treated you badly at first, you’d have walked away from him. He wouldn’t have been able to control you the way he did. That’s the trick of the abuser. He builds you up so that he can tear you down, piece by piece.”

I conceded, even though this didn’t feel like the truth. But I have come to understand that in some cases the truth doesn’t seem like the truth at all. I had judged my mother harshly for loving a killer; I had hated her for her weakness, for the fact that she’d do anything to keep even the cheapest brand of love. But Ophelia was just like her.

“When you’ve completely lost touch with your own self-worth, your very identity, he convinces you that he’s the only one who could ever love someone so wretched. The love he first gave you is a high you remember, and like a junkie you keep doing the drug, waiting for that first rush again. But it never comes. Unfortunately, though, it’s too late. You’re hooked.”

“He loved me,” I say pathetically.

My doctor gives a sad, slow shake of his head. “Ophelia, he was a psychopath. They don’t love.”

“No wonder they took your license away.” My words come back at me sharp and hateful. “You’re a goddamn quack.” The truth can make us turn ugly like that.

He smiles patiently, gives a gentle cluck of his tongue. “Temper, temper.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

He lifts a hand. “That’s all right. You’re under a little stress. I understand.”

“I can’t tell him what he wants to know.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“I don’t know where he is,” I say, my voice climbing an octave.

“You do know. Somewhere inside, you know.”


I am startled awake. The doctor, my dead doctor, is not here in the room with me. I am alone, clutching the now torn and wrinkled picture of my daughter. It looks as though I have clenched and clawed at the image, trying to climb through to save her. I smooth it out now.

“Victory,” I say out loud, just to taste her name. I have done this to her. The things we fear the most are always visited upon us; it’s the way of the universe. I rock with her picture, hating Marlowe Geary, hating the Angry Man, and hating myself most of all.

Of course my dream doctor is right. Marlowe was a sociopath and a killer like his father. And no, of course he never loved me. But that didn’t stop me from loving him, from giving myself over the way only an abused and neglected teenage girl can give herself over, like a virgin on an altar, gratefully willing to be sacrificed. He manipulated and used me, but I laid myself down for him. Every time he killed and I did nothing, something vital within me died, until I was little more than a walking corpse.

Now, strangely, I am resurrected in this place. I am neither the girl I was nor the woman I became. I am both of them.

I think of all those flights from my life, my fugue states. I wonder where Ophelia was going, what she knew that Annie didn’t. I suspect now that she was going to find him. I remembered what Vivian said during our last conversation: You were haunted by him…. Part of you, maybe the part that couldn’t remember so much, was still connected to him.

The question is, why? Was she trying to go back to him, wanting to be with him again? Was she that desperate, that stupid, that miserably in love? I don’t know the answer. But I am sure of one thing: Ophelia knows where Marlowe is. I just have to get her to tell me.

“Can you hear me?” I yell into the air.

The silence seems to hum, but it’s just the fluorescent light burning above my head, flickering almost imperceptibly. They’ve shut off the spotlight they’ve been shining on me—I see it mounted in the far corner of the room. I’m glad they’ve given up on that technique. In the other corner, there’s a security camera, a red light blinking beneath its lens.

“Where is my daughter?” I yell, louder this time, looking at the camera. More silence, and then I hear the buzz of a speaker.

“I don’t want to hurt her, Ophelia,” says the Angry Man, his voice, broken by static, sounding far away, as though he’s calling on an old overseas line. “I know what it is to lose a child. I don’t wish that on anyone. Not even on you.”

“Don’t hurt her,” I say quickly, feeling my chest tighten. “I’ll find him.”

The static from the speaker seems to fill the room. I should have demanded to hear her voice first before I agreed to help him. But I’m too desperate for those kinds of tricks.

“You remember?” he says finally. “You’ll lead me to him?”

“I’ll do anything you want,” I say, sounding as beaten as I am. “Just don’t hurt her. Don’t hurt my baby.”

I realize then that I’m weeping again. I’m so beyond shame that I don’t even bother to wipe the tears from my eyes.



35

When Marlowe and I finally got to New York City, to my father’s shop near the Village, I was a fly in a web, stuck and drugged, not even trying to escape. I didn’t even ask for help. It was still relatively early in our flight, only about three weeks after the fire at the horse ranch, and the authorities hadn’t put two and two together. At that point we were just runaways. I didn’t realize this, of course. I believed that we were fugitives, wanted as Janet Parker’s accomplices for murder and for the fire. I was still deeply in denial about what had happened at the gas station; in fact, it was gone from my consciousness completely. In my dreams I saw a bloody halo of hair spread out across a linoleum floor.

My father asked no questions. He let us stay in the small spare room I used to sleep in when I’d stayed with him in the past, in the back of his apartment over the tattoo shop. There was a pink bedspread and a patchwork chair. The radiator cover was the same purple I’d painted it when I was twelve. There was an old doll made out of denim, with red yarn for hair and wearing a black Hells Angels T-shirt. One of my father’s old girlfriends had made her for me long ago. Predictably, I’d named her Harley.

“I ran away when I was your age,” my dad told me when he took us upstairs to the bedroom. We’d just wandered into the shop; he hadn’t seemed surprised to see me. I didn’t know when he got back from his trip or if he’d ever been gone at all. I didn’t ask. “Been on my own ever since.”

He said it with a kind of uncertain pride that filled me with disappointment. I wanted him to be angry, to scold me and help me find my way back from the downward spiral I knew I was in. But right away I saw he wasn’t going to do that.

Marlowe and my father seemed to bounce off each other. They didn’t look at each other after the first greeting, a stiff handshake that seemed more like a confrontation ending in stalemate. Marlowe towered over my father by a head; Dad seemed almost frail and shriveled beside him. Another disappointment: In my mind’s eye, my father was always a big man, powerful and strong. But I saw quickly that he was no match for Marlowe, physically or in any other way.

If I recall correctly, we were there three nights. All those days seem to run together in my mind. Marlowe and I did little but eat and sleep in that quiet, dim back room, we were so exhausted and worn down. I remember having trouble differentiating between being awake and being asleep. I have vague recall of conversations with my father that seemed like parts of a dream: He asked about the weather in Florida…. He said he knew I was trying to reach him…. He was sorry that he’d been away. We talked about the tattoo he’d agreed to do for Marlowe. He seemed uncomfortable and tentative around me, as though he wasn’t sure how to handle this recent wrinkle in my life. Something inside me was screaming for help, but he was deaf to it.

On the fourth morning, I heard a light rapping on the bedroom door before it pushed open a crack. I could see my father standing there, motioning for me. It was just after dawn, the sun leaking in through the slats of the drawn blinds.

“O,” he whispered. “Opie.”

I slipped out from beneath Marlowe’s arm and followed my father down the narrow hallway into his living room. The space was dominated by a large pool table surrounded by a couple of old metal folding chairs. It smelled so strongly of cigarette smoke that it made my sinuses ache. There was a small, dirty galley kitchen over by the door, with dishes in the tiny sink and rows of empty beer bottles lined up on the counter.

My father leaned against one of the windowsills. Behind him I could see the rooftop of the low brown building across the street; someone had made a little garden there, put out some lawn chairs and a striped umbrella. I could hear the sound of early-morning traffic moving on the street below. My father looked older than the way I saw him in my memory, the hard miles of his life etched on his face in deep lines. He had a stooped look to him, dark circles under his eyes.

I hopped up onto the pool table and sat there, wanting to run over and have him take me in his arms. But my father wasn’t affectionate like that. The most I ever got was a quick, awkward hug, or he might present his cheek for a kiss. That was all he seemed capable of where I was concerned.

“Your mom called, Opie.”

I looked down at my feet, noticed that the red nail polish was worn away to little dots on each toe.

“You told her I was here.”

He shook his head. “No.”

“What did she tell you?”

He released a sigh. “About the fire. About her husband being killed. She’s in a bad way, Opie. And you two are in big trouble. Why didn’t you tell me about these things?”

I shrugged, examining my knees. They were bruised and dirty, unattractively knobby. “Doesn’t have anything to do with you, does it?”

He nodded toward the bedroom. “I don’t like that guy, Opie. He’s not right.”

But his voice sounded muffled and wobbly, as though I were hearing him through cotton in my ears. I didn’t answer him. I couldn’t. I knew that Marlowe was listening; I don’t know how, but I knew. My whole body was stiff with hope and fear—this was the moment I’d been waiting for, the moment my father would finally rescue me.

“You need to tell me one thing.” He walked over to me and put a finger gently beneath my chin, lifting my face so that he could look into my eyes.

“Okay,” I said. “What?” I wondered how he’d do it, how he’d get me away from Marlowe. I wondered if he’d already called the police, if they were waiting outside. I couldn’t believe how desperately I hoped this was the case. As much as I loved Marlowe, I was so deeply afraid of him, of the things he’d done, of how much worse it was going to get. These parts existed side by side within me, paralyzing me. I was a girl very much in need of help.

“You need to tell me everything is all right,” he said quietly. “Really all right.”

I look back on that moment now and try not to hate my father. It’s not just his weakness that I find so despicable, it’s that he wanted me to let him off the hook. He wanted me to ease his conscience.

I gave him what he asked for because that’s what I knew how to do. “I’m all right,” I said with a fake smile and a quick nod of my head. “We’ll find a place out west. I’ll get my GED and find a job. I’ll be eighteen soon, an adult. Older than you when you went out on your own.”

His relief was palpable. He let his hand drop to his side, and he released a sigh, gave me a weak smile. He wouldn’t have to be a father, to take the hard line, to step in and make difficult calls that I couldn’t make for myself. And anyway, he wouldn’t have known how.

He sat beside me on the pool table and held out a wad of cash, a thick, tight roll secured with a rubber band.

“There’s nearly a thousand dollars here,” he said quietly. He nodded toward the bedroom. “It’s for you. Not for him. This is your ‘screw you’ money. Things don’t go right, you find your way home with this.”

I wasn’t sure what home he was talking about. In that moment I knew that my only home now was with Marlowe. I took the cash from him. It was heavy in my hand. My heart sank with the weight of it.

“It’s only a matter of time before the police come here,” he said, keeping his voice low. His eyes were on the floor. “It probably won’t be today, but soon enough.”

I gave a quick nod. “You want us to leave.”

“If you don’t want them to take you back to Florida.”

I didn’t trust my voice as I battled the swell of despair in my chest.

“You swear you’re okay?” he said after a few minutes of silence.

I managed to look him in the eye and say, “I swear.”

He patted me gently on the back, placed a kiss on my forehead, and left the room as if he couldn’t get out of there fast enough. I heard his heavy boots descend the stairs outside the door. I sat a moment, allowing myself to dwell in a place of hope, waiting for him to burst back through the door or for the police to sweep in, but there was nothing except the sound of his footfalls getting more and more distant until I heard the street door slam closed downstairs.

“I told you he’d never come for you.” I turned to see Marlowe standing behind me. In his expression there was some mixture of triumph and pity. He walked over to me and put a hand on my arm. My flesh went cold beneath his touch.

The tattoo that started on his left pectoral swept over his shoulder. It was covered in antibiotic ointment, the lines swollen and raised, the visible skin red. It must have been painful, but it didn’t seem to bother him.

I gave him the money and he put it in his pocket; there wasn’t even a question that I would give it to him. I nuzzled my face against his good arm so he couldn’t look into my eyes. He stroked the back of my head and neck. I rested my hands on the tight, narrow expanse of his waist.

“You don’t need anyone else, Ophelia,” he said. “You belong to me.”