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“Her place.”
“Yeah, Finn looked into her. She’s got a place up in Sussex. Lived alone from what they could figure out without visiting. Worked at a bank as a teller. No tickets. Paid her taxes on time.”
“What’s her name?”
“What?” Miller asked, brows furrowed.
Thinking she hadn’t heard me, that I had been talking too lowly, I repeated myself.
“You don’t even know her name?” she asked, tone accusatory.
“Didn’t have a lot of time for pleasantries the first morning. And she’s been like this since she came back,” I defended myself, waving a hand to where she had yet to move, just stayed frozen there, gazing out at the goats fooling around.
“Her name is Meadow. Meadow Holland.”
“Meadow,” I said, trying out the sound on my tongue. “Suits her. What?” I asked, finding Miller watching me with unreadable eyes.
“Nothing,” she said, shaking her head.
Now, Miller was an expert liar. It was how she managed to do her job so well, how she managed to deal with the kinds of people she dealt with without getting too hurt. “I’m gonna go give her a pastry,” she declared suddenly, hopping out of the chair.
I watched, breath caught in my chest, wondering if she was going to manage what I hadn’t been able to pull off.
To get her to talk.
To get her to connect.
Snap out of it.
She took one of the danishes. Mostly because Miller pretty much forced it into her hand.
Then Miller did what Miller did best. She talked. It was how she got the job she got. You didn’t give someone the title of a Negotiator if they couldn’t talk. She didn’t even need any input either. Which made them perfectly suited.
And as Miller prattled on, Meadow slowly but surely started to pick apart the pastry, chewing slowly, eyes on the animals the entire time.
Dinner went much the same after Miller had coaxed Meadow inside, showing her all the things she had brought her while I cooked. Then she had sat beside her, urging her to eat, seeming satisfied when she’d eaten a third of her plate.
It was shortly after that Meadow patted the couch, inviting Captain up, then passing out.
“I can’t claim to know much about trauma,” Miller started a while later as we sipped coffee while the dogs ran out the last of their energy before bed. “That is more your expertise than mine. But I think she’s going to snap back out of this. Maybe she remembered a little bit of what happened. And her system kinda shut down a little while her mind tried to process it. She’s eating. She’s interacting with Captain.”
“Let’s hope.”
Miller left the next morning.
Meadow and I had a day similar to the one before.
But it was that night that the nightmares started.
Or, at least, when they first started to make her toss, turn, whimper, cry out.
When I tried to shake her out of them, she woke up shrieking, throwing herself away from me, running and hiding in the bathroom.
And she avoided me, refused to eat, stayed on the couch with her face buried in the cushions all day.
I decided to let her subconscious work through them without interfering. And we went back to normal.
It was the sixth day before I knew it. She’d been picking at food. Enough to keep her alive, but not enough to prevent her face from growing gaunt, her eyes sinking in, her cheekbones sharpening enough to cut glass. She drank coffee, but didn’t seem to get any energy from it, barely moving from the couch to the paddocks most of the time. Her hair grew limp and greasy, seemingly having no motivation to bathe.
I was worrying that Miller was wrong. That this was not the right place for her. That she needed more than I could offer. That she was never going to get any better.
But, for reasons I was choosing not to think about, I didn’t call her to tell her that.
I sat on it.
Stewed on it.
And that night, that sixth night, I went to bed thinking about it.
The slamming woke me up, knifing me up in bed before I was even fully awake, disoriented, stuck in my own mind for a second.
Then it started again.
A pounding at my door.
Mixed with scratching.
One of the dogs.
I knew before my feet hit the ground that it was Captain, that something was wrong.
I wasn’t sure I had ever moved as fast as I did then, making it across my room in two strides, throwing open the door, finding Captain there, ears back, tail tucked, whining.
I didn’t have to look to know, but I looked.
And she was gone.
“Fuck,” I hissed, grabbing my flashlight, throwing open the door.
Captain was on my heels as, for the third time, I tore through the woods looking for her.
But this time, she hadn’t wandered far.
My stomach dropped at seeing her in a small clearing in the trees, the moon shining down, bathing her light head in a gloomy glow.
