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Small victories. Yay me.

It should have felt like winning. I have thought about that a great deal since, because I did the right thing. The sensible thing. The thing any woman with any instinct for self-preservation would have done, and it bought me absolutely nothing.

Because I lay awake the whole night anyway.

That was the part nobody warns you about with defiance. It doesn’t silence your thoughts. The shirt was in a steel box behind two rings of wire on the other side of town and it might as well have been on the pillow beside me. I spent that entire night with my face pressed into cotton that smelled of laundry powder and a rented apartment, thinking about cotton that smelled of him.

So, I did what I usually did when I couldn’t sleep. I went in early.

Then I convinced myself that I was going to give it back. Because throwing it in a dumpster would prove nothing to anybody. He would never know I had done it, and for all he knew I would still have it folded under my pillow, which was exactly what he wanted to think. No, if I was going to give him nothing, he had to watch me do it.

That was the story, and I told it beautifully, all the way through a shower and a coffee I didn’t drink and seventeen miles of road before I would be faced with that locker door again. Before I could start smelling a murderer’s shirt like it was a drug I knew would eventually kill me.

I was going to hand it back to him and I was going to look him straight in those startling pale blue eyes and say something short. Something cold and final, and he would understand that he had misjudged me completely.

Because that was the whole of my strategy, if you can even call it that. Show him nothing. Give him no reaction, no blush, no flinch, no shaking hands, nothing at all to feed on. Men lose interest in things that don’t respond, and I had spent three years perfecting a face that gave nothing away. Of course, the problem with this plan was that I had let him take that perfected veil off me twice now.

A veil I wanted back.

If he thought I was unaffected, he would get bored. That was what I told myself. He would get bored, and he would move on to some other way of entertaining himself in this place. Then I could do my remaining days, collect my money, and disappear the way I always did.

Would he though, said the sensible voice, the one I had almost entirely stopped listening to. A man who had a guard walk away from a door. A man who got a shirt off his own back into a locked locker inside a maximum-security prison and knew exactly which one was yours. Does that sound like a man who gets bored?

No. It didn’t. I knew perfectly well that it didn’t.

But knowing a thing and having any other option were two entirely different animals, and this was the only lever I had left to pull, so I pulled it and I called it a plan.

I even practiced it at a red light, out loud, to the rearview mirror.

“I think this is yours.” And in my head it happened at his cell door, with bars between us, because that was the only version where I was the one who got to walk away.

I let myself have that the whole way to the fence line. And it was only when I was sitting in that parking lot with the engine off, in the shadow of the wire, that the sensible voice caught up with me and asked the obvious question.

And how exactly are you planning to give it back to him, Anna?

Because there was only one way to hand something to a man in a maximum-security prison.

You had to be in a room with him.

I sat there with my hands at ten and two on a car that wasn’t moving, in a lot I had been so proud of finding my way to eight days earlier. Oh, if only I could go back to that first day. But then again, what would I have done differently? I had needed this job back then just as badly as I needed it now.

I released a sigh and stopped asking myself what it was that I had done to put myself on his radar. What I could have changed on my fourth day, when he was first brought to Ashlock.

These questions lingered until I was once again faced with my locker. One I finally opened only to stare at the new bane of my existence before I took it out. Part of me wished I had been strong enough to just throw it in the trash and not bring it to my nose and breathe him in like I did. Then I put it into my bag instead of doing the hundred other things I could have done with it. Like burn it ritual style in the woods somewhere while trying to cleanse my aura and rid myself of his essence.

Yeah, because that didn’t sound crazy at all.

Jesus, knowing me, I would end up summoning a demon that looked just like him.

In the end, I told myself, brightly, in the voice I use for things I have no intention of doing, that I would decide later.

So, it was still in my bag when I walked through that gate. And it was still in my bag four hours later, when the warden of Ashlock came down to medical.

I had never met the man. I had been in that building nine days and I had seen him precisely once, crossing the yard-side corridor with two officers. Wardens obviously didn’t come to medical.

So, when he poked his head through the infirmary door and asked, very pleasantly, whether he might borrow me for a few minutes, I went cold before he had even finished the sentence. But I stood anyway, and I followed him down the hallway toward Halloran’s office.

“Doctor, would you give us the room, please.” It wasn’t a question, and Halloran didn’t treat it like one as he made his way to the door without asking why. He simply shut the door, and I stood in the middle of Halloran’s office with a man I had never spoken to, and I watched him do the strangest thing.