She staggers to her feet, her eyes red. From gagging? Crying? I don't know. She pulls her hair out of her face and goes back to the main room. I follow her trail to another peephole.
God, she's a fucking mess, and yet I still savor being this close to her. She sits on the edge of her bed, burying her head in her hands and shaking no. A breeze hits me and a foul odor wafts over. The eggs. She's been sleeping with that stench. I don't want to subject her to it, but she's not given me much of a choice.
She takes a deep breath and sits upright, slapping her palms on top of her knees. A new look of determination is in her eyes. She stands up and walks over to the corner where my chair is. I can't see it from this angle, but she reappears in my line of vision when she brings the chair close.
“What the fuck?” I mouth to myself as she stands behind it and mutters some words to up above. But I don't have much time to make sense of that when she plunges herself down onto the edge of the chair, landing on it with her stomach.
“What the hell?” I ask, my feet twitching, ready to run in there and stop her feeble attempt at suicide.
She does it again. I can tell there's not enough force behind it to do anything other than bruise. She has no idea the strength it takes to hurt oneself.
For a nurse, she's sure displaying an incredible lack of understanding of how the body works. The level of trauma she'd have to inflict to kill herse—I stagger back away from the peephole when it all clicks. Vesper's not trying to kill herself.
Sitting in my cabin, alone. Hungry. Tearful. Amongst the stench of old eggs and sticky juice, I watch the ants assemble. They invade my home, but it's just an illusion of a home. A home is a place where you can come and go as you please. Where you can cook a meal, or entertain yourself with books and invite guests. No, this is a prison designed to look like a home. These ants make it look so easy to leave as they form a continuous black trail from one slat in the wall to another.
Not having seen Night or having bathed or eaten for days, things become clearer, like some form of meditation. All I've had is the water from my bathroom and yet the nausea and dizziness come back every morning.
If he wanted to kill me, the man who mercilessly chased me through a forest, who fucked me at knife point—oh he would have found a much more fulfilling way to off me than with poison. Oh, he's poisoned me alright. Just not with chemicals, but with something far more insidious.
It's taken me days to chew on that reality, taste its bitter flavor on my lips. In the framework of whatever this is, killing me is the sensible conclusion. Being the father to my child is unfathomable. But this world I'm in: where my mother and the so-called sane world has already given up on me, and the man who stole me looked shaken up by my breakdown—a man whose presence I miss after two days of total solitude. Nothing is the way it's supposed to be.
But I am still Vesper Rivers. Underneath the yearning for the physical response to the stranger's touch and the company of his silent shadow, I still understand this is not the way I am going to bring a child into this world. He can have me. I can be his slave. His lover. There is something in me that grows in his shadow, like moss. But not a child. A child cannot know a father who hides behinds a mask with no words. Who relishes suffering and violation. And I can't accept that the fight is over. Because if we come together to create a human being—something from nothing— then we are forever united. He would have a part in my greatest creation.
So as I watch the ants, all bearing the weight of crumbs so many times heavier than their own bodies, I understand I have a weight of my own to bear. A load so much greater than I ever thought I could manage. I don't want this to be a slow death. I want it out now. Then, at least, we can go back to the way things were before that morning when I first felt ill, where it was just a simple disaster and not this complicated catastrophe a child would bring.
I come slowly to my feet, feeling heavy from the lack of nutrition and the weight of the impending mission. I've thought of ways to do it. He never leaves behind utensils made out of anything other than flimsy plastic. So I decide on the chair. I knew someone whose father saved his own life using a chair. He was home alone choking, and he flung himself down onto the edge with enough force to send the piece of steak flying out of his windpipe. If he can do that, I can do this. If that doesn't work, then I'll find something else. I will find a way.
I pull Night's chair from the corner of my room. The last time I touched it was when I sat on it, my legs splayed open, and came to thoughts of him. It was gratifying, that moment I climaxed screaming his name shamelessly. But as the high settled, the tide of shame washed in. When I felt sick and Night walked in, old Vesper burst out of her holding place, demanding to rebel, to not let this monster swoop in and pretend to be her savior.