Page 107 of Graceless

The bread was very good.

I hated that it was very good. He'd thought of bread.

Afterward I washed the plate and the knife and set them in the rack — the only rack, nothing like mine, no second cup beside the first — and I dried my hands on the enormous coat because there were no towels, and I stood in the kitchen of a house at the end of Long Island that I had not chosen, and I talked to the only person in the room who hadn't kidnapped me.

"Here's the situation," I said, one hand low. "Your father is an ancient, very large, very stubborn man who has confused love with a padlock, and your mother is going to get us home. That is not a plan. That is a fact. We do not live in houses other people put us in. That is from your great-grandmother."

The door opened behind me.

"Who are you speaking to?"

"Get out."

"I heard a voice. I thought⁠—"

"I know exactly what you thought." I didn't turn around. "Nobody's here, Raq. That's the whole design. Congratulations on the design."

He stood in the doorway a second longer.

"There is more bread," he said. "In the box on the step. I will not come in."

The door shut. I stayed where I was with my hand low and the counter under my elbows.

"He brings bread," I said, quietly. "That's his whole vocabulary now. Bread and doorways."

He spent the middle of the day at the woodpile, in shirtsleeves, in March — splitting logs he could have snapped like breadsticks, doing it the human way, the long way, the swing and the drop and the crack — and I watched him do it before I remembered I wasn't watching. The body votes first, and mine voted: the shoulders under the wet shirt, all that power making hard work look effortless, and heat rolled through me low and slow before the anger could catch it. I turned my chair toward the land and told myself I was studying the road.

So that's what I did. I studied it properly, out of spite — the track, the turn where it met the road, the scrub pine that blocked the sightline south — and I was still at it when he came in with the firewood and stacked it without speaking.

"You haven't eaten," he said.

"I ate."

"The bread. That was six hours ago. There are⁠—"

"I ate, Raq."

He stood there with the wood dust on his hands, filling the room, filling every room he has ever been in, and I watched him try to find a sentence that wasn't an order and fail, and try again, and fail again, and finally he just set a can of soup on the counter and went back outside.

I looked at the soup for a long time. Chicken noodle. The kind with the red label, the kind Nonna kept in stacks, the kind you heat up when somebody's sick or sad or nine years old and out of parents.

I heated the soup and ate it and washed the pot and set it in the rack next to the plate, and if he heard me through the wall and took it as a victory, that was his problem. The baby needed the sodium. Everything I did in that kitchen, I did for the six weeks. If he wanted to read it as softening, he could stand outside and be wrong.

The bed was narrow and cold and faced the wrong direction — east, toward the water, away from everything — and I lay in it with the door shut and listened to him not sleep on the other side of it. No footsteps. No shifting. Just the particular density of a room with him in it, the pressure I'd gotten so used to sleeping inside that its absence had woken me the morning of the note.

Now it was back, and I was back inside it, and I had not agreed to either.

I put both hands on my stomach in the dark and did the breathing — slow, counted — and through the wall, very quiet, as if he knew exactly how thin it was:

"Caterina. Can I bring you anything."

And that voice, through two inches of pine, did what that voice has done since a crosswalk on Fifth Avenue — went straight down my spine like a struck match, low and certain and made for the dark, and I lay there hating physics. You can lock a door against a man. Nobody's built the door that stops a voice.

"No."

"Water. A blanket. The⁠—"

"No."