It was a Friday in May, the gym nearly empty, just me doing the last of the closing checks, wiping down equipment under lights turned low to save power, when the door went and a woman I’d never seen before stumbled in like the frame itself had shoved her.
She was young, with dark hair coming loose from a braid and a look on her face I recognized immediately and hated recognizing, the specific, glassy wildness of someone who has just seen something no one should have to see.
There was a shawl wound tight around her throat, dark and wet through in a way that made my stomach drop before my mind had finished working out why.
“Where is he,” she said in an accent I’d grown familiar with, back in Rome, and her voice cracked clean in half on the third word. “Where’s Damian.”
“He’s not here,” I said, already moving toward her, some instinct in me reaching for a first aid kit before my brain had caught up with the shape of the wound she was pressing her hand against. “Are you hurt? Do you need me to call someone?”
She laughed, a terrible, unravelling sound. “You don’t know, do you.” She looked at me properly then, up and down, in a way that made my skin crawl. “I’m from Rome. I saw the three of you there, you know. Laughing your way round the Colosseum like a real family, him buying your boy gelato like he had all the time in the world for it.” Her voice cracked on the word family. “He never once took me anywhere. Not in all those months. He kept me in one room and told me I was the only thing he’d wanted in decades, and then one day he simply stopped coming back to it, and I was still there, waiting for a door that was never opening again, before I understood that on my own.”
Her hand pressed harder against the shawl, and something dark shone wet between her fingers in the low light.
“That call he took, the middle of your trip, the middle of the night. Ask him who it was from. Go on. Ask him, and watch his face while he decides how much of the truth you’re allowed to have.”
She pulled the shawl back, just for a second, just long enough for me to see the raw line beneath it, still fresh, still hers. “You know what this is from? It’s the only way I’ve found to feel him again. Not him. Just the bite. Just that one second before the rest of it turns to nothing. I do it to myself now because he’s not here to do it for me anymore.”
She let the shawl fall closed again, her hands shaking. “And now he’s found himself a new pet. You. He’s taking you places he never once took me, and he’ll use you up exactly the same way, and I needed one person to understand that before it happens to you too.”
I don’t remember deciding to sit down. I remember the bench catching me, cold metal through my leggings, and Michael’s face rising up out of somewhere I’d thought I’d buried it, a parked car above a gorge, a woman who wasn’t me, a truck with no brakes and a lie I’d carried for six years before Damian had ever taught me what it felt like to be told the truth.
I have been here before, some small, exhausted voice in me said. I know exactly how this story goes.
The girl was still talking, still bleeding, still shaking, and some professional part of me knew I should be doing something about the wound at her throat, calling an ambulance, staying calm. Instead I heard myself say, very quietly, “I need you to leave,” and watched her stumble back out the door she’d come through, into the dark, still pressing that shawl to her neck, still saying his name like an accusation.
I locked up without finishing the checks. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking long enough to manage the till.