He watched her smile, watched it hold too long and twitch a little at the corners, then slowly fade.
“Good,” he said, rising, leaning to fasten it around her neck. She touched its cold metal as it rested on her clavicle.
He pulled back to take her in.
“It was hers,” he said then, with such little buildup that Anna was momentarily baffled by his meaning.
“Sorry, what?” she asked, moving, unaware, directly into the void.
He slipped a hand into hers and pulled her close, part embrace, part restraint, and panic fizzed to life in Anna a microsecond too late.
“The necklace. It was Melissa’s,” he told her simply. “I kept it.”
Her eyes flew to Simon’s face. He knew. It was over.
If she struggled, then she knew things would escalate very quickly, and she didn’t want that. She needed time.
She forced love back into her eyes. He knew she knew, but he did not know how she felt about what he did yet. That was the only space she had left to live in.
“I know it wasn’t your fault. You loved her, didn’t you?” Anna asked, as gently as she had ever asked any question.
Simon pulled back a little, surprised, clearly not expecting this softness, this apparent lack of fear.
He took in her guileless face, still filled with love.
“Yes, I did love her. Very much,” he answered after a moment.
He released one of Anna’s hands and touched her face, the flush in her cheek. He was gentle with her.
Then his hand trailed down to the heart necklace, dangling against the delicate bones of Anna’s neck, his eyes filling.
He kissed Anna, hard, the force of it, the need in it overwhelming. Anna held firm in her conviction, yielding to the kiss, to him, to all of it.
More than that, she kissed back, as hard and desperate and needfully as him. A kiss that showed her intent, her acceptance, herloyalty. Because she needed time.
Slowly, with her one free hand, she found the bedside table and the heavy water glass placed on top of it.
Simon whispered in her ear, “We can make this work. Do you want to try and make this work?”
“Okay,” she said, her voice docile, pliable, and as he pulled back to look at her, she smiled. He laughed with happiness and drew her back into a kiss.
Anna’s hand finally gripped the heavy glass and she inhaled sharply as she slammed the blunt object into Simon’s temple, thick shards of it coming away in her hand, some embedded in her palm, some in his scalp.
He reeled away, blood streaming from his head, and Anna ran for her life.
She was almost halfway down the stairs before she felt his hands on her back, and then the ground disappeared beneath her—for a few moments she was suspended in nothing, and then she hit. The world turned black.
On the hall floor she flitted in and out of consciousness, the sounds of his feet thundering down the stairs behind her, his face close, pain-stricken, drifting in and out of focus. She could not feel parts of her body, her legs, one arm.
“It’s okay,” Simon told her softly, lovingly. “I’ll look after you. I’ll make this right. We’ll make this work, I promise you.”
When she woke, she was in this room. She knew it wasn’t Simon’s basement, she had seen that before—this room looked new, built specifically for her.
The necklace was around her neck, a bunch of fresh flowers on the plywood table.
She found, when she finally managed to haul her body up, that everything ached. Her injuries from the fall seemed to be serious, though she felt little pain—just a dull throbbing, which she inferred must be due to some kind of pain medication he had given her.
She shuffled over to the blooms on the table. She sat down on the plywood chair and caught her breath.
