Page 274 of These Tears

Nobody knows the ordeal Elias and I have survived. Nobody knows the truth. Hell, for all I know my nerves are feeding my brain all the wrong signals.

The leash is gone. I’m less certain about what it left behind, though. Because, if I strip it down to basics, I’ve been a captive woman living under a certain set of conditions for several months.

And while I contemplate just how far into crazy I’ve wandered, the red truck backs out and disappears into the night.

When I’m back at the cabin, the dogs have emptied their snacks and spilt their water all over the floor.

Grudgingly, I tidy up and tuck them away, then try to keep busy with the dishes, the chickens and the shower, but the emptiness gives me too much room to think.

As the night takes over, the dogs begin to fumble at the base of the couch, hunting for that perfect spot Elias never lets them have.

While they move around, I rub my fingers as if the motion might produce a coherent thought I can cling to.

I could take the truck. Keep going until the cabin, the lake and everything else disappears behind me.

My eyes find the keys hanging on a hook by the door. I pull the throw over my feet instead.

The doubt creeps in quietly and cruelly: what if what we have is real only because he taught my fear to answer his voice?

What if I have simply been conditioned to be a good girl to him?

I look at the naked ring finger, then the range where he’d thrown the dark band of my history. I think back on all the times I looked at his face and saw the truth.

‘Maybe I’m just full of shit,’ I rumble to myself.

Brute launches himself to my left and Menace takes it as his cue to conquer the right side of the couch where all the cushions live. I don’t shoo them off. I’ve already spread the throw in sacrifice to the dog hair. And somehow, having them close makes me feel safer.

I glance at their closed eyes. Listen to their exhales as they settle into the softness. I try to borrow some of that calm.

Doesn’t work, of course. Sleep is out of the question, and my thoughts only grow louder the longer I sit there.

I reach behind me towards the smaller bookcase Elias built to separate the kitchen from the sitting area. My fingers are already seeking the familiar spine of my friend Mary and her monster—

But they catch only air, one of my nails grazing the back of the bookshelf.

I stab the empty space with my gaze, stilling entirely as I try to make out what I’m seeing.

My hand remains suspended, and despite myself, my mouth curves.

Elias had taken Frankenstein. Our Mary. Our monster. The first bridge I ever crossed to him. That he’d taken it feels – briefly – like he wanted to keep me close.

Then the absence becomes too stark to ignore and starts grating.

Forcing my mind away from it, my gaze moves to the ouline of the red book where the dungeon and haystacks wait in lurid promise. It’s the one he used to drag me closer, page by filthy page, until curiosity and study melded into heat, and that heat became part of our orbit.

I reach for it slowly, already hating the little tremor in my fingers as if holding a trap long since sprung but still capable of biting.

And I start reading it from the beginning.

Morning comes grey, warm and humming with insects, and I begin with everything that is not fishing. I feed the hens, change their water, collect ten eggs and clean up, then check the shed latch, the dogs’ bowls, the dry wood stack and the traps closest to the house. Every small chore becomes a perfectly reasonable excuse not to touch the fishing rod now hanging against the tool shed door.

By noon I have swept a clean floor twice, rearranged kindling and begun negotiating with myself over whether starvation – while observing the thaw of reindeer meat – is truly worse than gutting something with eyes and scales.

That is when the grind of tyres on the track breaches the windows.

My heart leaps so violently I nearly fall over Menace.

Because the pistol isn’t at my waist.