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Or maybe I might be reading a little too much into things.
Milana’s shoes are thrown to the side of the chair and her legs dangle in the air, like a bored six-year-old. The dress she’s wearing is loose-fitting today, and it doesn’t quite suit her.
“Milana?”
She snaps upright, her expression fraught and complicated before she wipes it clean. “June, hello. I didn’t realize you had an appointment with Sara today.”
“Oh, I didn’t,” I say, realizing that I’ve walked in at the worst possible time. “I just wanted to refill my vitamins. I figured I’d come here and do it myself.”
Her usual aura of composure is fragile at best. She looks tired. As I move closer, I realize she’s wearing only a little lipstick and not much else. Again, very much out of character.
“I’m sorry, I’ll leave,” I say. “Just… are you okay?”
She meets my eyes and pushes herself off the chair. “Do I look okay?”
The question isn’t as antagonistic as it seems on the face of it. It’s more like she’s genuinely curious. “Well, you don’t look like you normally do.”
Milana laughs suddenly, and the sound makes me jump. “No, I suppose not. I don’t feel like I normally do, either.”
“Should I get Sara?”
“She’ll be out soon. She’s probably trying to figure out how to break it to me,” Milana says.
I frown in confusion. “B-break it to you? Break what?”
“That there’s no hope for me. I can’t have my own children. I will never have my own children. That he took that away from me.”
There’s a wildness in her eyes that terrifies me. But in the next instant, they fall flat and lose their spark.
In its own way, that’s just as scary.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean to freak you out.”
“No, no, you didn’t. Of course you didn’t.”
She shakes her head and wraps her arms around her body like she’s cold, though the room is comfortably warm. “It was stupid of me to hold out hope. He was not the kind of man who did anything halfway.”
“Who are you talking about?”
“The fucker who bought me from my mother at twelve,” she whispers in a hard, haunted voice. “The bastard who gave me a hysterectomy at fourteen. The fucking pimp who sold me from one man to another to another.”
I’m dumbstruck. Some words just aren’t meant to go together. Some things are too horrible to be real.
But the look in her eyes says it’s real. It’s all very, very real.
Before I can come up with an appropriate response, Sara walks out of a room in the back. She stops short when she sees me standing there. “June?”
“Sorry,” I fumble. “I came to refill my vitamins.”
Sara glances towards Milana and then back to me. “Would you mind waiting outside for—”
“No,” Milana cuts in. “It doesn’t matter if she hears. It doesn’t matter who hears. Just tell me what I already know.”
Sara’s eyebrows flatten, and I feel my heart drop for Milana. “I’m sorry, Milana. He did a thorough job.”
Despite the fact that she already suspected the answer she’d get, I watch as her face crumbles. Her body follows suit.
I move forward at the same time Sara does. We attach ourselves to her sides and hold her upright. Her neck drops and I hear one heart-rending, guttural sob escape her lips.
