Page 87 of Until You Found Me

“I’m scared.”

“I know, but it’s okay to lean into it.”

“I’m not ready.”

“You are.” The stroke of his thumb flutters across her fingers. “You are.”

Whatever he says after melts and pools together like quicksand the moment she lifts her head to meet his eyes. His mouth is moving, and the tone is soothing and low, that deep rumble she’s so fond of that shivers in her bones.

Lean into it a voice in her head whispers, and this time she does.

“Her name is Rose, and she’s ten years old.”

Once the lock is turned, the cascade of memories come hard and fast, filling the frame of her mind’s eye like a moviescreen, perfectly curated and in chronological order. That’s how she tells the story of Rose to Logan, from the beginning, because that’s how she lives it all over again.

The morning sickness that wouldn’t stop unless she ate bananas. The way the baby kicked at her ribs while doing somersaults and how happy Tessa had been to know she was growing someone that was all hers. Selfish, but she had never wanted anything more than she wanted that baby. That elation that came with a positive pregnancy test was only tempered by worry about how she’d protect someone so innocent.

‘It’s you and me,’ She whispers to the ultrasound photo, brushing the slick paper with her fingers.

“I was alone when she was born. I took a taxi to the hospital. He was away, probably with some other woman like always.”

She tells him how afraid she was when they wheeled her in for an emergency C-section because she didn’t want to die alone. Didn’t want to lose this baby alone.

‘A piercing scream hits her ears and then a plump baby covered in cream cheese and jelly is placed on her chest. Pretty blue eyes that lock onto hers, fresh and new, untouched by the horrors that await.’

Rose’s first laugh, first word, and first steps all roll off her tongue like she’d never forgotten them. Her hands intertwine with Logan’s, her emotions and memories shifting from joy to heartbreak, only to resurface with more hidden gems.

“She ruined all the tomato plants in my mother’s garden. I didn’t get to visit her much, but that day I put Rose in one of those walkers and she waddled over to the plants and yanked them up one by one. Couldn’t stop laughing about it.”

He follows her through the first day at school, the first playshe performed at age five dressed as a stegosaurus, and the first time she was old enough to see her mother bleeding and understand why it happened.

‘Go back to sleep, baby. I’m okay. Just a scratch. Go back to your room and lock the door until I come for you.’

“Her favorite color was orange. She liked horses and cats but not dogs. Dogs were scary. She loved to read, had a whole stack of books from the library at any given time, and spent most days in her room with them. Her favorite movie was white fang. She was quiet…lonely…had a hard time making friends…always walking on eggshells. I did that, Logan. I let her grow up like that.”

He opens his mouth to reply, but she cuts him off with a gasp, her grip on his hand bruising. “She found a kitten on the road one day when we were walking home from the grocery store. He never let me drive. I knew we shouldn’t have taken it home, but it was so little and I couldn’t leave it, so we hid the cat in the garden shed. Would feed it when he went to work or to sleep, but then he found it and—”

She goes quiet, her eyes squeezing shut again as her memories veer into dangerous territory.

“He hit her right across the face hard enough that she fell over. I didn’t see it coming because I was always able to distract him, but he lashed out so quickly and then he came for me and…I don’t wanna talk about this.”

“You don’t have to.”

“We left for the shelter the next week. Stayed one night. One whole night. Then I went back.” Her voice cracks all over again in a prologue of what’s coming. “Did I tell you she wanted to be an artist? She loved to draw. She was ten years old, only ten.” She pauses, her eyes wide, a lick of flamessimmering in her pupils. “There’s a fire.”

The audible hitch in his breath at her monotone words cuts through the silence like a hot knife.

“She wanted me to sleep in her room with her that night, but I couldn’t because he wanted me with him. She was afraid of the dark. When I woke up, there was smoke everywhere, coming in under the door, through the cracks in the baseboards.”

For all the ways her emotions carried her on a journey these past few minutes, they fail her now. She is numb and hollow, reciting lines as if they mean nothing when they mean everything. She looks down at her hands, the patchy white scars that spread over her palm connecting with the moment of their origin.

“I ran to the door and grabbed the handle and it burned me. I tried again anyway but I couldn’t open it so I tried to use the bedsheet over the knob, but he wouldn’t let me.”

‘Gonna get us both killed if you open that! There’s a fucking fire on the other side.’

“He didn’t care that she was down the hall. Already breaking a window to climb out and leave us both. I knew he was right about the fire, that I couldn’t help her if I was dead, but I couldn’t leave her either. I couldn’t.”

There’s a truck screaming in the background, red lights flickering through the smoke, muted and disorienting before she’s dragged out the same window by a fireman, kicking and screaming. She crawls on her knees toward the blaze, the heat of it burning her skin even outside. It lights up the whole block with how much progress it made on the other side of the house before she even woke up. She tries to rush back in but someone grabs her again, dragging her down to the ground where wet grass stains her knees, only this timeit’s Logan with a hand around her waist pulling her back against him until her struggles fade and she collapses into a heap against his chest.

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