Page 104 of Beyond Protection
The caption read:Subject requires proper display conditions. Current environment causes deterioration.
"She talks about me like I'm a painting."
Eamon reached out for my hand to stop me from scrolling.
"You're not." He paused. "You're the person I'm falling for."
My throat closed.
For eighteen months, someone had been documenting me like a specimen. Subject. Object. Thing to be preserved.
And Eamon called me a person.
I looked at him. He was staring straight ahead through the windshield, jaw tight, like he'd admitted something that scared him.
His hand stayed on mine.
I turned my palm up. Threaded my fingers through his.
Held on.
The light turned green. He didn't let go. Just shifted to drive one-handed and pulled into traffic.
Neither of us said anything else.
Eamon took us through Beacon Hill first. A detour that added twenty minutes and looped past Mom's neighborhood. He drove slowly. Checking mirrors and waiting for the gray sedan to reappear.
It didn't.
I watched the city slide past through the passenger window. Holiday lights were strung along rooflines, some in racing colors.
Mom's street came into view. Her house sat tucked back from the road—small, precise, surrounded by the stone garden she tended with discipline. No lights visible. She was already at Ma's.
"Clear," Eamon said—more to himself than me.
He turned back toward the main road. We climbed the hill heading north.
My reflection stared back at me from the window. Hollow-eyed. Jaw tight.
I looked like some of the photographs from Vanessa's apartment.
Beauty through discipline. Perfection as devotion. Mom's lessons, twisted into something monstrous. Vanessa had takeneverything Claire taught me about shaping clay and decided to apply it to me.
The worst part? I'd been doing the same thing. Shaping myself, controlling the display, and performing perfection.
I'd just never locked myself in a cabin to do it.
My stomach turned.
"Mac." Eamon's voice cut through my spiral. "Breathe for me."
I did. Once. The air caught halfway down.
"Again."
Four counts in. Hold. Four out.
We crested the hill. The city sprawled below us—downtown towers wrapped in fog, and the Sound barely visible beyond.
