“It’s been a big day,” Bay said. “But you know what? You’ve let your guard down. This getting lost is just what I hoped for you.” He smiled. He seemed to be taunting me. “Little sister,” he said again.

I pushed back. “I could have fallen and died in the woods. I could have gotten shot by a poacher,” I said. Or I could have chosen to hitchhike away. Since he’d bothered to talk to me at the bus stop, didn’t he want to preserve me? I needed to know that I was not interchangeable, that there was something to me that he liked, something he liked beyond my willingness.

“Beryl,” he said. My name was an insult. “I thought you’d understand the Ash Family needs you to go beyond your comfort. Honestly, I was going to bring you there tomorrow. But, you know.” Firelight animated his silhouette, his rough hair, his dark slimy coat. I searched for the gentleness I’d seen at the bus stop. He’d once had calm eyes and a frightening face; now it was the opposite: his eyes were tracers, the lights that smear your vision with afterimage; his eyes were bright with malice. “We can give up.”

This wasn’t what I wanted. I could already feel the shame of returning to Isaac, to his narrow room in the squat, the train pushing through the woods right past the gardenia bush that suffused all our years of courtship with its heart-wrenching heavy gorgeousness. In the summer, even naked, even with the fan, our bodies got sticky as tape. He didn’t like the people who smashed windows, but when we lay together and he let his hand drift over my neck and touch me so lightly I could barely stand it, I’d picture him throwing a rock into a wall of glass, and how the shatter seemed to happen not radially but all at once. He was studying at UNC, he wanted me to study, too; he didn’t feel the call to a more essential life. I needed to go home changed or not at all.

“For the time being,” Bay said. “Not give up give up. It’s just good sometimes to let yourself go out with the current. Let the tide recede.” He shifted tactics. “How’s your hand?”

“I think I should go to a clinic tomorrow. It’s just getting worse. Though,” I added quickly, “I’d like to believe what you said, that it will be okay, and just scar.”

“A clinic, like a hospital?” The mood had darkened again somehow. He straightened. “Well, if you go to the hospital, you’re going back.”

He was agitated and I didn’t know why, so I pushed it. “Are you making me choose between you and my hand?”

“We don’t deal with institutions like hospitals. We can’t be numbered.”