But she didn’t want to. She wanted to wrap herself in this whole thing and sit in a corner with it. She wanted to stay quiet. She wanted to think.

And if she had thought that she couldn’t be any more irritated with Ryder than she was, she had just proven herself wrong. Because as annoying as it was to be this confused, it was even more annoying to feel out of character.

To be confused by herself, and not just him.

“Why have you suddenly gone quiet?”

She looked over at Iris. “I just... I don’t know. I need to think. Maybe I need to talk to Ryder.”

“Well, normally that doesn’t stop you from talking to everyone else first.”

“I... Do you think I’m crazy, wanting to have a baby?”

Iris paused, staring at the back wall behind Sammy’s head. “At first. Yes. My initial thought was that you were a little bit crazy. I’m not going to lie. But I don’t know. Mostly I’m happy with my life here. And I’m here still because of choices that I’ve made. Nobody made them for me. But yes, sometimes I think about what it might be like to change things drastically. And I know if I did that Ryder would be the first person in line to tell me that I needed to go see a psychiatrist. But I don’t think he gets a sense of quiet desperation being here. I think the quiet is something that he likes.”

“Well, why don’t you do something about it?” Sammy asked. “I mean, no one is stopping you.”

“Because I don’t want to do anything drastic. Drastic doesn’t appeal to me. But you’re you, Sammy, and I can see how you would be the first one of us to do something different for the sake of it. That’s not a criticism. It just is.”

“But you could do something drastic. If you wanted. I mean this is the thing. We all stay in our prescribed boxes, in our little houses, doing everything that’s expected of us just because. And I can’t help but think that even though there were deeper, more toxic things at play, to an extent my mother stayed with my father because she didn’t know what else to do. We get entrenched in things and people and places, and we don’t know what else we can be. Well, I don’t want to be that. I want to be everything that I can be, and I don’t want to wait around to have it.”

“I have a feeling I’ll just end up waiting around,” Iris said, smiling sadly. “I just don’t have it in me to do things the way you do.”

“You could,” Sammy insisted.

“Some of us are caged birds,” Iris said. “Some of us aren’t. I don’t know if you can learn to be wild when you’ve been kept inside for so long. Afraid of everything out there.”

“Is that the problem? You’re afraid?”

Iris’s smile turned sad. “I’ve been afraid of everything since I was fourteen years old.”