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Then they’re not. Then they’re small. Then the street bends, and they’re gone.

I drive.

I turn left at the end of her street, right at the light, onto the road that goes back toward the bridge. I check the mirror every three seconds. Nobody’s behind us. The streetlights go by, one, then dark, then another.

I’m breathing like I just did a triple shift. My mouth is full of blood. I can feel my bottom lip swelling, fat and hot, and every time I swallow, I taste copper. My ribs on the left side scream when I breathe in too deep. The knuckles on my right hand are split open, both of them, the same two from the Rubin game, and the steering wheel is sticky under them.

None of it matters. I don’t feel any of it.

Because she isn’t saying anything. She’s not crying, not shaking. She isn’t yelling at me or asking what happened or asking where we’re going. She’s just sitting there, in the passenger seat, with her hands in her lap and her bitten finger curled in against her palm, looking straight ahead through the windshield.

She isn’t looking at anything. I don’t think she’s seeing the road. Her eyes are open and pointed forward and completely empty, like somebody turned off the lights behind them and left the house standing.

That scares me worse than anything in that living room.

I stop at the light by the pharmacy. The one with the faded blue awning. Red. Nobody else on the road, Thanksgiving night, just my car humming and the turn signal ticking because I forgot I put it on.

I look at her.

And I know this.

I’ve seen this before. Not tonight. Not in that house. I’ve seen this exact face. This exact stillness. Eyes forward. Hands in her lap. Nothing showing. Nothing at all.

I’ve seen it at the end of a long table under a cafeteria window. In a hallway, when I said her name. In the east stairwell with the wind coming through sideways, with her bag against her chest and her eyes on the front of my shirt, while I stood over her and told her what she was going to do.

I thought it was weakness. That’s what I told myself, back then. I thought she was empty. Quiet. A girl with nothing going on behind her face, who did what she was told because she didn’t have the spine for anything else. I thought it meant she’d given up. I thought it meant I’d won.

It isn’t that.

This is what she looks like when she’s surviving.

This is what her face does when something is happening to her that she can’t stop, and she’s gone somewhere inside to wait for it to be over. I watched her do this for four years, and I never once wondered where she was going. I never asked what she was waiting out.

It was me. Some of the time, it was me.

The light turns green. I don’t move. Nobody’s behind us to honk.

“Tess,” I say.

Nothing. She doesn’t turn her head.

I make myself ask it. I don’t want to. I already know. “Has he done this before?”

For a long time, she doesn’t say anything. I think maybe she didn’t hear me. Maybe she’s too far down inside to hear anything.

“He’s always been like this,” she whispers.

Not yes. Not no. Not not like tonight. Just always. Flat and tired, like tonight wasn’t anything special. Like a man sitting on her back with his hand on her head is just the same thing that’s always happened.

I put my foot on the gas. The car moves through the green light.

And it all comes together in my head.

The very memory of everything I put this girl through makes me want to climb out of my own skin.

We cross the bridge. The green railings with the paint peeling off in curls. Neither of us says anything. Her hands haven’t moved in her lap. Mine are shaking on the wheel, and I can’t make them stop.

I should ask her where she wants to go. I know I should. You ask. You let her pick. You tell her she can say no. That’s the whole thing I’ve been trying to learn.