Beth supports her back against my bed frame, making no move quite yet to start playing the video again, Claire’s face frozen in panic on the screen as she gazes with despair at one of her most recent concoctions.

“The interview went well, right?” This is Beth’s second time tonight asking me about the job Kelsey Rodriguez recommended, as if she’s expecting me to lie to her. I guess I would be mistrustful, too, if she had bailed on me for months.

“Yep. I should hear back by the end of next week if I got it. The woman who interviewed me seemed to like me, and my old boss has agreed to give me a good recommendation, thank goodness.”

Beth slaps the floor. “Atta girl, getting your life back on track, and with a slightly less capitalistic job to boot!” I grin, stuffing more chips into my mouth before pressing the space bar to play the show. I’m not quite in the mood to discuss my “big transformation” for the twelfth time.

Because I’ve noticed Beth noticing things. Things I can feel her wanting to ask about, then uncharacteristically pushing aside, so obviously trying to revel in my return to the land of the living, as she calls it.

When she first walked into the apartment, her eyes immediately flitted to the hole in the wall from my fist, still unrepaired. She asked immediately about the lack of cups in my cupboard. I told her I’d thrown them out, that a bunch of them were chipped. But maybe she’s connecting the dots, that big brain of hers putting two and two together. That I’m glued together like eggshells, my recovery a facade.

The truth is that despite everything that seems to be going right, I’m still biting my inner cheek, sighing when I taste blood. Sleeping fretfully, thinking about Anneliese and her honeyed voice constantly. Hearing it, too, syllables threading themselves silkily through my dreams.

That letter, what did it mean? Inexplicably, I’d smiled after reading it, before I began to cry. Anneliese had taken me, kidnapped me, for a short period of time, presumably. But the entitlement in that letter was shameless, pathological. It was downright insane. No wonder my dad had moved the two of us swiftly down to the city only a month later.

And yet.

And yet, no one had ever written about me, spoken about me in that way. My mother had never left me a note to explain how cherished I was, like other dying parents do. My stoic dad certainly made me feel loved, but he never expressed it so articulately. No boyfriend, even, had been so unabashed in his affection toward me, so willing to lean into their love.