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“She seemed a little confused at first,” Emil tells my father, as if I am not sitting here able to tell the story for myself. “I think she’s a little shell-shocked by it all.”
“Of course she would be,” my father says. “I suspected as much during those few times we got to speak to each other. I knew you couldn’t really want to stay with him,” he says to me.
“That’s no life. Not for you. Not for my daughter. He made you say those things.”
I direct my glower to the floor and swallow my objections.
I make myself nod.
Did Kay not tell him everything that I said and did at the engagement party? If she did, I can’t tell. Maybe my father’s hatred for Salvatore is so vast, it eclipses reality itself. I stoke the lie gently, keeping it burning.
“I’m sorry,” I say softly. “I didn’t have another choice.”
My father likes this answer.
If he wants to believe that I was a miserable, unhappy prisoner, then I’ll let him believe it.
“What happens now that I’m home, papa…?” I ask.
“You rest up and recover,” he says immediately. I don’t know what I’m supposed to ‘rest or recover’ from—it sounds like more time spent alone in a room. The thought makes me nauseous. “That’s all you need to worry about. The family will handle the rest from here.”
The rest of what?
Salvatore’s calm, certain words ring back through my thoughts: It doesn’t matter how far you go, I’ll still come after you.
I dread the thought of what Sal might do to get me back—almost as much as I dread the thought of never seeing him again. That can’t happen. They can’t keep me away from him forever—not unless one of us dies first.
My father scoots forward on his seat, clutching my hand in his. “We’re here for you now, Tessa. You’ll be back to your old self soon. Every bit of what was done to you in that place will be undone. I’ll see to that.”
I just nod and keep my eyes down, where he can’t see the truth in them.
“I’m so tired, papa,” I say instead. “I just want to finally get a good night’s sleep—”
“Of course,” my father agrees. “You must be exhausted. We have a room all ready for you, with some of your things from your apartment.”
He guides me to a spare bedroom. I stand, stunned, in the doorway of my bedroom.
These are not some things from my apartment. It is my apartment, or at least, my bedroom. My same bed, my desk and chair, all spattered with paint splotches and covered in haphazard books and sketch paper, still in the same arrangement that I left them in. Half-filled paint bottles line the windowsill.
My white-board calendar is filled with dates that have long since passed. Even my clothes are in the closet. It is as perfect as they could have gotten it, given the different shape of the room, picking up my old life and planting it here in front of me.
“I wanted to make you comfortable,” my father explains. “Get you back to normal.”
There is nothing normal about this, something cautions me.
My apartment was my escape from my father. Now, it’s here, inside his penthouse.
Like all of my father’s kind acts, I see the purpose beneath this one—I have nowhere to go. Home is here.
I swallow my ungrateful attitude and ask him for a phone before I go to sleep, a way to text everyone that I’m now safe. My request is pushed off until the morning, and my suspicion quietly doubles. We hug again, both my father and my uncle, as we say our goodnights. I thank them both for my rescue. The words taste like vinegar.
The moment his footsteps fade, I check the door and breathe relief. I have one cold comfort in all this—my door isn’t locked.
My old bed creaks just the way it used to, and I wrap myself in my favorite blanket. Even in its soft grip, the comfort of this room feels scratchy and artificial.
When I was a child, and too indulged by my closest relatives, I was given a pet chinchilla for one of my birthdays. When I cleaned his cage, I had to keep a little of his old bedding, so that some of his scent would remain, marking it as safe and home. It’s a little insulting, being treated like you have the same emotional intelligence as a rodent—even a cute one.
Maybe it’s a little deserved.
