Page 105 of Nowhere to Hide
Her hand comes up from where she’s been gripping her own arm — she reaches toward me, fingers open, trembling — and her face twists as she fights the urge and forces her hand back, closing it into a fist against her stomach.
“I love you,” she says.
She’s never said it to my face. The word love arrives like the front edge of something else, and I can feel both things at once: the thing I’ve wanted to hear for weeks arriving in the same breath as the thing that’s taking it away.
“But it’s a lot, Rowan.” Her voice cracks on my name. “Every time I take the mask off, every time I let myself be the real me — the loud one, the messy one, the too-much one — somebody makes me pay for it. Harrison did. My parents did. Mason did.”
“I love that messy you, Sloane.”
“I know.” She wipes her face with her sleeve, rough, impatient. “But with mess comes cleanup, and I know what it costs you to always clean up after everyone. And I don’t want you to grind yourself down for me, Rowan, and I definitely need you to ask me first before you do.”
She looks like someone who’s been through something physical, not a conversation, and every instinct is screaming at me to step through that gap and put my arms around her, which is the exact thing she just told me is the problem.
I should say something, but every sentence I reach for sounds like another thing I’d be trying to fix. And for the first time ever, the machine in my head has nothing queued, just her telling me she loves me and that it isn’t enough.
Her hand moves toward me one last time — further than the others, close enough that I can almost feel the warmth of her palm before she pulls it back against her chest, because she’s been fighting this the entire time and she’s finally out of resistance.
“I’m going to close this door now,” she says.
And the door closes between us, soft.
I stand in the hallway, looking at it, and I don’t know what to do.
twenty-eight
SLOANE
Professor Moreno readsthe last page, sets it down on the desk, and takes off her glasses.
Her pen hasn’t moved since page two, and even there she only circled one word — testimony — with a line drawn to the margin, where she’s written something I can’t read from here.
As she gathers her thoughts, I sit with my hands in my lap, looking around. Her coffee mug says WELL-READ WOMEN ARE DANGEROUS, and I stare at it because looking at her feels like watching the jury from the defendant’s box.
I wrote it over the weekend. Saturday night into Sunday morning, after I ended it with Rowan and he left and I stood in my room with nothing louder than the silence except my own voice looping in my head.
I meant every word, but the room after he walked away was the loudest empty I’ve ever stood in. Because his absence sat on the end of the bed where he wasn’t, in the quiet where his voice should have been. I’d told myself sending him away would feel like taking something back.
But it just hurt.
I had good reasons, but it hurt.
Nina was right about you.
I said that to him, and it broke him, and I still don’t know if it was cruelty or honesty or some combination I haven’t found a word for yet. Because he couldn’t stop clearing everything out of my path.
All of it done for me and none of it done with me.
Because most of all I’m tired of being handled, of being the target of gossip and innuendo, of being punished for one poor decision. Harrison weaponized what I gave him, and Mason used it to hurt me too.
I love Rowan, and he’s different — better,farbetter — but he hurts in a different way, and the question I keep turning over is whether the hurt that comes from someone who actually sees me and the traits about himself he can’t seem to change is a hurt I can live with.
I was still turning it over when sleep wouldn’t come, so I sat at my desk and wrote.
My truth.
The first version was angry and the second was sad and neither one was totally the truth. The third version was, and I almost called it “Testimony,” but that felt like too much, so I wrote the word into the third paragraph instead.
I wrote it the way Moreno asked me to months ago. It’s furious and personal, the argument threaded through the experience instead of floating above it, and when I was done I had six unfiltered pages of my own voice.
