Page 59 of The Quiet Tenant

He smooths the blanket over your legs. “Sometimes it’s just bad luck,” he says. “She kicked it once, but it came back five years ago.”

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YOU STOP BEINGafraid. You are so sick of scheming, of plotting your way through another day.

And so you tell him. Later that night, when he returns, you tell him.

“You did it wrong. The other day. You didn’t check the handcuffs.”

He’s sitting on the bed next to you. The bottle of Tylenol rattles between his hands.

“They were open,” you continue. “Just wide open. I could have left, you know. But I didn’t.”

He puts down the Tylenol. He sighs—his breath on your face, on your neck, on your chest. He leans over you and whispers in your ear.

“I know.”

For a brief second, you see the light. A tragic thought pierces you, entry wound, exit wound. It jolts you awake. It undoes you, the entire geometry of you, your straight lines and your bends and angles clattering to the ground.

He didn’t mess up.

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SHE KICKED ITonce, but it came back five years ago.

The information travels through you in the night.

It takes its time to reach you, but once it finds you, it spreads to your entire self like an infection.

Five years.

You think.

This is when he found you.

He was going to kill you, but he didn’t.

Things were happening to him. Things he couldn’t stop.

Death was happening to him, to the family he had built. And there was nothing he could do about it.

It must have unmoored him.

He needed control. This is what it’s about for him. Deciding where a woman begins and where she ends. Deciding everything, and getting away with it.

He got you. You were in the truck.

He was going to kill you, but he didn’t.

CHAPTER 41

The woman without a number

You look for him. The person who roofied you. You assume it’s a guy. What are the odds? You try to find out. You grab your laptop and look up “drink spiking statistics,” “drink spiking perpetrators,” “people who roofie other people.” You can’t find what you’re looking for. People like you don’t report what happened to them.

Everyone on the street is a suspect. The guy in front of you at the coffee shop. The yoga instructor, the bus driver, your professors. No one above suspicion.

You stop sleeping through the night. Every evening around seven, a shadow descends upon you. Before bed, you check that the door is locked. Check, and check again. You look inside closets. You checkthe bathroom. Check under your bed. You search and search and search for the threat following you like a shadow.

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