Page 7 of Sting of Sin

There's a kind of tired that has nothing to do with rest. I was that kind. The kind where giving up starts to look like rest itself, where a quiet, reasonable part of you sits down beside you in the dark and starts to whisper, maybe it's easier if you stop. Maybe the new place is just a place. Maybe you survive it the way you survived this one, small and quiet and behind glass. And I listened to that voice longer than I'll ever want to admit, lying there with my shaking hands, because it was offering me the one thing I was starving for, which was to stop being afraid.

And then, sometime in the dead middle of the night, I woke.

Or I think I woke. That's the part I could never be sure of, after, whether my eyes came open or only believed they had.

There was a shape in the doorway.

Darker than the dark around it. Tall, and still, not the moving still of someone passing on their rounds, but the planted still of someone stopped. Someone standing in the gap of the half-open door, looking in at me. Not for a second, not in passing. The way you look at a thing you mean to come back for.

The cold went all the way to the bone. The bells didn't ring; they screamed. I couldn't move. I couldn't make a sound. I lay pinned under my own thin blanket and stared at the shape, and the shape stared back.

I blinked.

The doorway was empty.

Just the hall. Just the strip of gray light and the line under the door and no one, nothing, no shape and no watcher, the way there's never anything there when you finally make yourself look. A nurse on rounds, moved on. A trick of the dark and the meds and a mind that had carried too much for too long and was maybe, finally, four years late, starting to come apart at the seams. I laid every reasonable thing I had over my hammering heart like blankets, one after another, and not a single one of them took. Because reasonable had nothing to do with it. The bells never dealt in reasonable. They only ever knew what they knew.

Something had been there. Or nothing had. I would never be able to prove either one to a living soul, and that, I was learning, was the worst place a person could be made to live, in the gap between a thing your body is certain of and a thing you can't show anyone else.

But the shape, real or dreamed, did one thing for me: it killed the quiet reasonable voice stone dead.

Because that voice had been telling me to lie down and let it happen, and now every feral nerve I had was on its feet and screaming that letting it happen was how you ended up in the woods. I'd had this feeling once before. A whole day of it. And I'd talked myself out of it with reasonable things, and reasonable things had very nearly been the end of me.

Not again.

I thought about Eli then—not the love, I'd buried that so deep it barely had a pulse, but the other thing, the bedrock thing. He heard me. He always hears me. He was coming. He had to be. And if he wasn't, if Friday came and the van came and the boots didn't, then I would not give whatever was on the other side of that wall the satisfaction of finding me already broken when it finally came through.

I uncurled my hands. I made them still. I turned my face to the window and found the mountains in the dark and held on.

Three days. Maybe two.

And I did not let myself decide whether the shape in the doorway had been real, because it didn't matter anymore. Real or not, it had told me the truth the bells had been telling me all along, the truth I'd spent four years refusing to hear.

Something was coming.

CHAPTER FIVE

TURNED OUT YOU can't just buy a person back out of a place like that. I'd half figured money'd do it, the way money did most things. It didn't.

Our lawyer was a buttoned-up prick named Ross, good at what he did, never met a problem he couldn't bury in paper. Warden put him on it the same day, find the fastest legal road to getting Bee out from under that hold and the guardianship moved to Throttle. Ross spent two days on the phone and came back with a face that told me everything before he opened his mouth.

"It's doable," he said, in Warden's office, me and Throttle standing there wanting to put a fist through the desk. "Emergency petition to reassign guardianship. Motion to discharge against the standing commitment. Doable. But it's the court's clock, not ours. Weeks at the fast end. Months if her treatment team digs in."

"And they're gonna dig in," I said.

"They already have." Ross set a folder on the desk, and he didn't quite look at Throttle when he said the rest. "A clinician named Sutter filed an updated assessment this morning, same name that's on the transfer order. Convenient timing. Documents what he calls acute regression. Recommends the higher-acuity placement as medically necessary." He paused, and I watched him decide to just say it. "And it flags that, quote, recent visitation has correlated with patient destabilization."

The office went quiet.

"Say that last part again." Throttle's voice had gone flat and careful, the way it went right before something got broke.

"It's in her record now," Ross said, gentler than I'd ever heard the man. "That your visits, you and Maul, coming around again, are part of what's making her worse. It's written up as a reason for the move. On paper, the family's the problem."

I watched it go into Throttle slow, the way a blade goes in slow, the kind you don't feel land till it's all the way home.

This was a man who'd raised that girl out of nothing. Fed her, sat up with her, built a whole childhood for her with his own two hands because the two people who were supposed to couldn't be bothered to. His entire young life was taking care of his sister. And here was a piece of paper, with a doctor's name on it, telling him the showing up, the one thing he'd never once gotten wrong, was the poison. That she'd be better off if he just stopped coming.

"That's a fucking lie." It came out of him cracked down the middle. "Tell me that's a lie, Ross. She's better when we're there. She talked. Four years of nothing and she said three words to Maul, how the hell is that her getting worse?"