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WREN
The first time Rose miscarried, she wasn’t even trying to get pregnant.
She and Jared had been together only a few months. They were still in the getting-to-know-each-other phase, which is why she didn’t even tell Jared she was pregnant when she peed on that stick and it turned positive right away.
“What the hell do I do now, Wren?” she asked me, as though I’d have the answers.
“Yeet the baby into the woods and let it be raised by wolves?” I joked. I used humor as a coping mechanism a lot back then. It was easier to pretend to laugh than it was to actually face anything that was happening to either of us.
But she didn’t laugh. Truth be told, neither did I. The joke faded away and silence rushed in to take its place. Both of us sat staring at the blank walls, as if the future was playing out there on a projector screen.
“You have to tell him, Rosie,” I’d nudged her gently.
Her eyes drifted to mine, but it didn’t feel like she was even looking at me. More like through me. Beyond me. “He’s on a camping trip this weekend with his friends. I’ll tell him when he gets back.”
She never did, though.
She didn’t have to.
She woke up the next morning, and the problem had taken care of itself.
Six years later, she and Jared started trying to get pregnant intentionally. Twelve months of that felt like divine punishment, she always told me. If I’d told him about the first one, maybe it wouldn’t have… She could never quite bring herself to finish that sentence.
I didn’t believe in divine punishment. Still don’t. But I do believe in cruel ironies.
Life, in my experience, is full of them. And blaming yourself never helps solve a damn thing. That’s exactly what I told Rose the first time she voiced her punishment-from-above theory. It’s what I told Mom every time she tried to blame herself for why Dad left us.
And yet here I am, sitting in a barren little room with a door I can’t unlock, dressed in my captor’s clothes because they’re the only things available to me, blaming myself for getting kidnapped.
Again.
Cruel ironies. They arrive at their cruelest and most ironic just when you’ve convinced yourself that they don’t exist in the first place.
And who knows? Maybe they don’t. Do I believe in them because they’re true? Or are they true because I believe in them?
Better question: am I losing my goddamn mind?
I’ll admit: there are moments in this room—plenty of them—when my own thoughts don’t make sense to me. Like I’ve found myself on a train headed somewhere I’ve never heard of, taking a path I’ve never seen, and there’s no way in hell to get off.
And in the spirit of cruel ironies, there is in fact a literal train track running just past the tiny box window of this house-or-whatever-it-is. Two weeks or so in here and I have yet to hear a single train go by, but something about a rail leading from nowhere to nowhere makes me inexplicably sad.
Two weeks. My God. It’s so easy to let each second slip by numbly, but they’re stacking up higher and higher.
Two weeks. Fourteen days.
Fourteen whole days of sitting up here. Sleeping. Eating. Obsessing. Repeating. Sleeping. Eating. Obsessing. Repeating. Sleeping. Eating. Obsessing. Re?—
I bounce off the bed when I hear the latch unlock from the outside.
Cian is coming.
The fact that I’m actually excited to see him is an indicator of just how desperate I’ve become. Cian’s the only one who actually talks to me like a person. The two other men who visit me with clothes and food just stare blankly at me when I speak. They ignore me when I ask questions. They retreat and lock the door again whenever I start pleading.
“Hello, Wren.”
I sink to a perch on the edge of the mattress with a hand placed protectively over my stomach. “Cian.”
