Page 23 of What We Burn

I eat half the bowl—mostly the liquid. But it’s the most I’ve managed and I’m stupidly proud of myself.

Milo takes the other half when I push it away. Before I’ve even managed to thank anyone, the medical team arrives and I’m whisked upstairs to bed.

The bathroom mirror becomes a problem.

When ten o’clock hits and the house has gone quiet, I’m finally left alone long enough to look at myself.

I don’t mean to.

That’s the stupid part.

I need the bathroom. Need to brush my teeth, maybe splash water on my face, maybe prove to myself I can stand in a room by myself for five whole minutes without falling over or coming apart. That’s all.

But the second I step into the pool of yellow light and look up, there I am.

For a second, I don’t understand what I’m seeing. My brain keeps trying to slide off it, like the image won’t hold. The girl in the mirror is too pale. Too hollow. Her hair hangs limp around her shoulders, brushed smooth by someone else’s hands. Her eyes look huge in her face, silver and glassy and ringed in shadows.

And then there’s my neck.

I peel off the bandage.

I haven’t looked. Not properly. At the hospital, I’d felt it with my fingers—the raised welt, the tender edges—but Rosaline always changed the dressing with my chin tilted up, eyes on the ceiling. I never asked for a mirror and nobody offered one.

The rope left a groove. A dark, uneven line that wraps my throat from one side to the other. The skin is raw along the deepest part, shiny and pink and ridged where it’s healing wrong. Around it, the bruising fans out in a watercolor of purple and yellow and a sickly green that I didn’t know skin could turn.

It looks like a necklace made of violence.

I turn my head. The mark goes all the way around. I can trace the path of the rope—where it cinched, where it twisted, where my own fingernails clawed at it and left a second set of scratches overlapping the first. My fingers were bandaged at first because I’d shredded three fingernails to the quick trying to get it off me.

I stare at the woman in the mirror.

She stares back. Whoever did this signed their name on her body.

I grip the edge of the sink.

The anger arrives without warning. It comes up from somewhere deep and low, bypassing all the fear and the exhaustion and the please-and-thank-you politeness I’ve been wearing like armor. It’s hot. It fills my chest like a breath I can’t let out.

Someone did this to me. Someone lured me into those bushes with a dog that probably wasn’t even hurt. Someone unscrewed the landscaping lights and made sure there were no cameras and measured the branch height and tied the knot and waited for me to walk into it.

Someone planned this. Someone enjoyed planning this.

And I don’t know who.

My reflection’s eyes go flat. For a second she doesn’t look like a victim. She looks like someone thinking about what she’d do if she found him.

I pull the T-shirt up to my chin, covering the mark, and the woman in the mirror disappears behind gray cotton.

I turn off the light. Get into bed.

I curl onto my side and pull the blankets up to my chin. In the dark, the house ticks and settles. Through the wall, Micah’s floorboards creak like he’s pacing—slow and steady and close.

I close my eyes.

The rope drops over my head.

It cinches before I can scream. My feet leave the ground. I claw, fingers splitting, the world tilting sideways as the pressure in my skull builds and builds and my vision tunnels to a pinpoint of light getting smaller, smaller⁠—

I wake up gasping.