He lets her soothe him.
“If I opened the door right now,” Simon asks, looking back to her. “If I opened the door and stood back, would you leave me?”
Anna’s expression doesn’t know what to do with itself for a second before it lands on concern.
Anna realizes that Simon knows about the cat. No one is coming to save her, she realizes, her stomach dropping. He is going to kill her.
“Are you okay, Simon?”
“Just stop!” he shouts.
She stops abruptly.
He continues. “The question I am asking you is: If I open the door, would you leave or would you stay in here?”
He knows the answer, of course, but he wants to know if she’ll keep up the ruse to the end.
The room is heavy with silence. Anna’s leg has started jiggling, her insides beginning to vibrate with fear.
“Is this a trick, Simon?” she asks, almost a whisper.
Simon walks over to the door and opens it with his key. He drags the chair from the table and props the door open, then he moves to the farthest corner of the room and kneels down with his hands behind his head.
“Run. Go,” he says, his eyes locking with hers. “If you want to. Now’s your chance to get away. Do you want to stay here with me or not?”
Anna looks to the open door and beyond it she sees the concrete steps rising up toward grass, sky, warm sunshine.
She looks back to Simon, his route to intercept her blocked by various articles of furniture.
And suddenly she is up and running, her movements not as controlled as she would like but her speed desperate.
Her world blurs as she flies toward the door, her bare feet slapping up the stone steps that she has never seen before, and suddenly she is in the garden.
She hurtles toward the glass back door of the house, and inside, her bare feet squeak over kitchen tiles, then up steps toward a hallway she definitely does recognize. The front door is only meters away.
It is Simon’s old house, she realizes, it always has been.
She grabs the latch of the front door and yanks it hard. It does not budge. She tries again. Nothing. Frantically she pulls and pulls, the latch rattling but not opening.
It is locked.
Again, and again, and again, she tugs, her whole body ramming back and forth against the frame.
The sound of heavy footsteps behind her.
The door will not open. It was all a trick, Anna realizes; there was never a way out of here. She should have scaled the garden wall but she didn’t think.
But suddenly she is aware of movement beyond the front door, voices out on the street, people talking, the blurred outlines of figures, then she catches the flash of blue and red lights farther down the road. Without a second thought she screams and screams, fists pounding on the glass. They are so so close…if she could only get their attention.
But he is behind her. She turns. He stands in the hallway looking at her. In his hand, a syringe.
“I guess we know now, right?” he says, stepping closer, impassable, unstoppable.
“What?” she whispers, almost inaudible.
“That you don’t want this anymore. If you ever did.”
She knows there are no words that can turn this around, that can give her another second; all that is left is to fight.
