“Samantha,” he says.

He looks to where her nails draw blood on his arm.

“Samantha.”

Her breath still comes fast and shallow, like a dog’s after a long game of fetch. Sweat beads on her forehead as soon as he wipes it dry.

“Samantha. Sweetheart. Look at me.”

She does. Eyes snap open, hard and sudden as a door slammed by wind. All pupil. By now he knows that this is just the flipside of catatonia. He needs to talk to her while he still can, as the flood of mania recedes, but before it is gone entirely.

“You see now that you are safe,” he says. He’s memorized this from the booklet, from the one workshop they attended together. “You are safe in your apartment, in your bed, in my arms.”

He takes a breath, waits, speaks again.

“Say it,” he tells her. “Say I am safe.”

Her expression doesn’t change. He can’t meet her eyes anymore and he looks down, at anything else. The underside of her top lip is chewed raw. Red as a torn strawberry.

He knows she’s supposed to say it, to repeat his words back into the world and let her speech repattern her fear responses. But he can’t make her. It doesn’t seem right to force her to do anything.

The therapist had said, You seem to find two primary impulses: a dissociative state which serves as a protection mechanism, and a state of panic, flashback, induced repetition.

He dabs her forehead again. Kisses her again. This next part is hard. Everyone, the therapist, the books, the trauma counselor tell him that she needs to address what happened, reconstruct the narrative, exert mastery over it, control.

“Samantha,” he says, his voice as cool and level as he can make it. “Tell me what happened that night.”

Her fingers loosen on his arm and instinctively, maybe, he pulls his arm away. He sees his blood already drying on the sheets. When she speaks, in the moment of her first syllable, the monotone dial-tone hum of it, the voice uttered out of a locked room, he knows this will be no different than any of the other times.

“There was a girl alone in the forest,” she says.

“No, Samantha. That’s not real. You know that’s not real.”

He’s thinking: she stepped out of the shower, she sat at the table and then stood at the door. It closed.

He has said to her, a hundred times, a thousand: “This is not your fault, this is not your fault, this is not your fault.”

He had stood at the window, he had sat at the table, he watched the door close.

Now it’s too late. He knows she won’t say anything, but he’s talking just to talk, to hear her voice while he still can. “Tell me,” he says. “I’m here. It’s Ethan. I’m here.”

He wants to hear her say his name. He wants to hear it on her lips. But the time for that, like everything else, is long past.