Page 104 of Every Step She Takes
My chest tightens, and there’s a football in my throat, and all I can do is stare at that low-quality photo of Sadie and me. That’s the worst part: the way this photo distorts an innocent moment, the way the article treats Sadie as a faceless object of temptation, the way I brought her into all of this, exposed her to public scrutiny, made her an accessory to my catastrophic mess.
I don’t know who took this photo. No one on the tour would do something so cruel, something that could out Sadie before she’s ready. But there were a dozen people from my father’s staffwandering around the vineyard at any given moment.Mystaff. People who sold me out for a trite news story.
I hate that this photo ruins the perfect memories of those nights with Sadie at the vineyard, that it taints something I hold so sacred.
ThatItainted it, ruined it, like I knew I would, and now I can barely breathe.
“Mal?”
My name sounds faint over the screaming thoughts inside my head. I turn, half-numb, and see Vera standing in the lobby in her matching silk pajama set. “I saw the news on my phone,” she says to me in a quiet voice. “I’m so sorry they printed that garbage. That private picture of you and—”
“Don’t tell Sadie.” The entire newspaper crumples in my tightened fists. Vera watches me smash the photo and the article and the whole damn thing into a wad before tossing it in the nearest trash can.
“Of course,” she says gently. “You should be the one to tell Sadie.”
“No. I-I don’t want her to know about it at all.”
Vera stares at me through her giant, tortoise-shell glasses. “You… you’re not going to tell her?”
“Please,” is all I say in response. I feel like a crumpled newspaper in someone else’s fist.
“Please.”
Vera doesn’t say anything at all.
I’m avoiding Sadie again.
I avoid her at breakfast when she tries to ask me why I wasn’t in bed this morning. I avoid her as we leave the hostel in the pouring rain, as we trudge through the wet countryside, as we push through the storm until we reach the N550. When we stopfor morning tea, I finally tell her I have a headache. It’s not a lie, exactly. It does feel like someone is drilling into my skull with a dull screw.
The lie is that I don’t tell her everything else. I can’t even look at her freckled face without drowning in guilt. It’s not a particularly challenging day—only 19.5 kilometers to Pontevedra, with little elevation change after the initial hills— but I’m out of breath the entire time. I can’t seem to fill my lungs all the way, and there’s a stabbing pain every time I try. The more I gasp and choke for air, the more my headache intensifies, the more I worry I’ll never be able to breathe again.
We arrive in Pontevedra a little after two, each of us soaked beyond reason. After checking into our private albergue, Inez sends us to our rooms to dry off and siesta before dinner. I can’t get there fast enough.
I need to take off my too-heavy pack and my too-tight sneakers that I stole from my childhood bedroom in Vigo. I need to rip off these thick, wet wool socks and these waterlogged layers. I can’t have any fabric touching my skin. Only then will I finally be able to catch my breath.
“Mal.” Sadie’s soft voice, usually such a comfort, grinds against the back of my teeth. I don’t want her to see me like this. I don’t wantanyoneto see me like this. I’m like one of those women who excuses herself from the dinner table when she starts to choke because she’s too embarrassed to let anyone see her cough, one of those women who ends up dying alone in the kitchen.
“Mal, what’s wrong?”
“Everything hurts and I can’t breathe,” I snarl as I forcefully kick off my shoes. One sneaker bangs against an Ikea wardrobe in the corner of the room and leaves behind a muddy print.
“You can’t breathe?” Sadie repeats, stepping closer to me. A soothing hand finds my shoulder, but I yank myself away.
“I-I can’t have anything touching me right now,” I try to explain. I’m just lucid enough to realize how deranged this sounds.
But Sadie doesn’t react like it’s deranged at all. “Can I help?” She carefully untangles my arm from my wet raincoat, and my chest feels a little looser. Then she removes my damp fleece, my T-shirt, my soaked-through socks. My bare feet on the cold hardwood ground me. When I’m wearing nothing but my underwear and a tank top, Sadie leads me over to one of the twin beds. There’s still a pain in my ribs, a sharpness in each shallow inhale.
“Why can’t I breathe?” I ask her.
She perches on the bed next to me. “I think you’re having a panic attack.”
I cough out a strangled laugh. “I-I don’t have panic attacks.”
“Okay.” She’s as close to me as she can be without touching my skin, stripped down to her own underclothes as our outfits sit in a wet mound across from us. “Can you smell that?”
I inhale through my nose. “Smell what?”
“I don’t know… something spicy, maybe? Or smoky?”
