A cloud of steam oozes into the hallway. She finds him curled up on the floor, naked and shivering. His hand is bleeding. His eyes are far away. His chest hitches with a cough.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” she says, and all he can say is “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

And then the coughing takes over and something gray and gelatinous ejects from his mouth onto the floor.

“Oh, hell no,” she says quietly. “Not you too, Jack. Not you too.”

He tries to tell her something. Something about escaping from an apartment. He doesn’t enunciate, the words coming out drizzly and murky when he says, “I ran. I opened the window and I jumped onto the roof and then hung from the gutter and dropped onto the lawn and I ran. And I came here. And it happened again. I woke up and I had a knife. And the whispers. The whispers told me—”

“You’re not making any sense. Slow down or shut up.”

“I’m not safe. I’m not safe.”

He coughs again, every tendon and vein standing out from his skin. “I’m not safe,” he whispers.

She studies him for a long time. “Well, I’m not afraid. So you’re safe with me.” Then she unclips the handcuffs at her belt and tosses them at him with a rattling clank. “Now put those on.”

He picks them up incredulously. “Where,” he says. “Where are we going?”

“I’m taking you home.”

13

This isn’t the first time Jack has woken up confused. But instead of a whiskey headache pounding behind his eyes, he feels deeply rested. Instead of standing blearily in his driveway, he is lying in bed. Instead of midnight air chilling his naked skin, a band of sunlight warms his face and goldens his vision when he flutters open his eyes.

Outside the window a magnolia tree blooms and birds flutter among its white fist-size flowers. He knows that tree well, but he hasn’t seen it in years. And the window is on the wrong side of the room. The walls aren’t blank but filled with neatly arranged framed prints of Mondrian and Miró. His body is naked and the bed is stripped down to a plastic mattress pad. All of these details come to him in a disoriented rush, and he tries to sit up but can’t, his wrists rattling with the handcuffs that link him to the bed frame.