Instead, I'm here without them.
Close enough to smell the sea they don't even know I'm looking at.
Surrounded by beauty that somehow only makes the ache in my chest bigger.
I take another determined sip of the terrible coffee and wrinkle my nose.
"When I get home," I mutter, "I'm making everyone come to Italy."
The thought settles something inside me.
Yakob comes back down the terrace at mid-morning with dust on his boots and the flat, unhurried walk that I've learned means the news is good. He's been up on the ridge since before light, watching the harbor through the little scope from his pack.
"The four by four went out on the first ferry," he says. "Both men with it. Heading towards Salina." He sets the scope down on the table, squared to the map edge, everything in his world at right angles. "They've crossed this island off. The search has moved on."
"So we're safe."
"Safe enough. We hold until tomorrow. Then we can leave."
"Right," I say. "Great. That's great."
And it is. It's the best sentence anyone has said to me in two weeks. The men who spent last night walking a torch beam across our floor are on a ferry moving further away from us, and tomorrow there's a boat, and after the boat a plane, and after the plane, home. It is objectively wonderful news, and I smile at him, full wattage, then I head back into the small kitchen and start washing the one mug we have between us. That's when I notice my hands.
They're shaking.
Not trembling. Shaking, properly, like a person carrying something much too heavy, except all I'm holding is a tin mug.
I stare at them like they belong to someone else. I quietly urge them to stop. I have a whole system for this, learned at age twelve from Aidan, who has never once been calm but is excellent at impersonating it. You count to two hundred. You breathe on the fives. You give the panic a job, he says, and it forgets to be panic.
I get to eleven.
The mug slips. It hits the stone floor and goes over twice with a bright tin clatter, and the sound is wrong, the sound is exactly right, it's the bucket. It's the bucket in the cell skittering across the floor the night I jumped for the window and fell, when I lay on my back in the dark counting to two hundred and then two hundred more, waiting for boots, waiting for the door, waiting to find out what happens to captives who are trying to figure out ways to escape. It's the same sound and my body doesn't know the difference. My body has apparently been keeping minutes this whole time, filing everything, the van and the cloth over my mouth and the stone room and Ken's eyes sliding over me, and it has chosen now, in this warm kitchen, on this safe morning, to read them all into the record at once.
"Iris."
I hear him but I can't answer. There's something enormous coming up through me, rising like water in a well, and I press both shaking hands over my mouth to hold it down and it comes anyway.
The first sound I make doesn't even sound like me. It sounds like something tearing.
Then I'm on the floor. I don't decide to be, I just am, down by the overturned mug, and I'm crying the way you're neversupposed to cry, huge and ugly and loud, and somewhere in the middle of it I realize I'm screaming too, actually screaming, into my hands, because a week of not screaming has to go somewhere. All of it has to go somewhere. The van. The dark. Seven days of being charming at men who looked through me like a window. Seven days of singing Ma's ballads under my breath so quietly they were barely songs, all while wondering if I’d ever see her again. Long, lonely nights lying on that mattress doing sums about ransom and leverage and being calm, and brave, and fine.
And underneath those nights, a whole life of it. That's the part I don't expect. The wave goes down and down and there's no floor. Twenty-seven years of being the sunshine. Of being the one who walks into the kitchen and takes the temperature and fixes it. Of doing my crying in my room so nobody's day gets dented, because five brothers went through hell before I was old enough to remember it, and my whole job, my whole life, my one great talent has been being the thing in that house that never needs carrying.
Nobody has ever carried me. I never let them. I never once let myself need it.
"I was so scared." It comes out of me in pieces, between the sobs, half sentence at a time. "The whole time. I was so scared, Yakob, and nobody could hear me, and I kept thinking, what if the last thing my family knows about me is that I went out on an errand. What if Ma has to live without ever knowing what happened to me? What if they never found me? I couldn't even understand what the guards were saying about me. They'd look at me and laugh and I didn't know, I didn't know what was coming, every time the door opened, I didn't know. Only Moustache was nice to me and now he’s probably dead. And you have a finger in your jacket pocket.A finger. And my familydon’t even know I’m safe,” and the rest of it stops being words at all.
I'm shaking so hard my teeth are chattering in the middle of a warm morning. I can't stop. I've officially lost the ability to be fine and I can't find where I put it and I'm terrified, distantly, underneath everything, that this is just me now. That the girl who got taken is gone, and this shaking thing on the floor is what came back.
Then there are arms around me.
He doesn't do it the way people do it in films, sweeping in, gathering me up, shushing. He comes down onto the stone floor with me slowly, one knee and then the other, and he moves like a man defusing something. Maybe he is. His arms come around me from the side and then all the way, and he draws me in against his chest, into the warmth of him, his heart very steady under my ear, and he holds on.
Everyone in my life has always handled me gently. Yakob holds me the way you hold something in a high wind. Both arms, all his strength dialed to exactly enough, one hand cradling the back of my head, and when the next wave hits me and I break all over again, howling into his T-shirt, he doesn't flinch or loosen and he doesn't tell me to breathe or be quiet.
"You're safe now," he says, low, into my hair. "I've got you."
"I can't stop." I'm gasping it. "I'm sorry, I can't—I can't stop it."
