Page 10 of Her Captive

She nods.

"Your palm was split. I cleaned it. It's shallow. It'll scar if you don't keep it dry for a few days."

"Okay."

"There's clothes in the top drawer of that dresser. Mostly mens. Mine. They'll be too big. There's a robe on the door."

"Okay."

She doesn't move to stand. She doesn't come nearer. She sits with her hands between her knees and waits for whatever I am going to do next and does not pressure me to do it. It is the least pushed I have felt in a room with another person in more than a decade, and it makes me want to cry, and I don't.

I push the quilt back.

The nightgown is not on me. I am in a henley, gray, soft from washing, that falls to mid-thigh. The wool throw from my mother is on the chair at the foot of the bed, folded once, the way you fold a thing that matters. Max looks at the wall while I sit up. She keeps her eyes on the wall until I have my feet on the floor and the quilt pulled around my legs.

I sit on the edge of the bed.

I look at my left hand.

On the ring finger is the eternity band Daniel put there eleven years ago. Platinum, a full circle of small diamonds, the kind of ring a man puts on you when he wants the sentence to be complete. I have worn it every day for eleven years. I look at it in the dawn light coming through the window and I feel a thing I can put a word to for the first time all morning, and the word istired. I am tired of this ring. I have been tired of it for years and I have not been allowed to know that I was tired of it until this second.

I pull it off.

It comes off easier than I thought it would. The skin under it is a pale band, almost the color of Max's scar. I close my hand around the ring. I sit there holding it.

"There's a dish," Max says, without turning her head, "on the dresser. If you want to put it somewhere."

There is a small ceramic dish on the dresser. White. Empty. I cross the room in bare feet and the floor is warm wood and I put the ring in the dish, and the ring sits there looking smaller than it has ever looked, a small bright circle on white. I stand there with my right hand flat on the dresser and I look at the ring for what would have been a long time in another life, and then I turn away from it.

"Thank you," I say, and I mean it this time.

---

She feeds me oatmeal from a saucepan on the stove.

The stove is a black iron thing with a kettle and one pot and a cloth over the handle. There is coffee in a french press on the counter. There is a radio on a shelf tuned low to a weather band, a man's voice reading wind speeds in a county I have never heard of. Max moves around the kitchen the way a person moves around a kitchen she has cooked in alone for a long time. She does not ask me what I like. She puts a bowl in front of me, oatmeal with butter and brown sugar and cream, and a mug of coffee, and she sits down on the other side of the table and does not eat.

"Did you eat already?” I say.

"Earlier."

"Before it was light?”

"I don't sleep much."

"Because of your job?”

"Because of my job."

I eat. The oatmeal is very good. I cannot tell you the last time a bowl of food moved me and it moves me. I have to put the spoon down after four bites and sit with both hands around the mug because my chest has gone tight and I don't want her to see. She doesn't look at me while it passes. She looks out the window at the pines.

"The weather?” I say, when I can speak.

"Storm off the coast," she says. "We'll get rain by tonight. Not snow yet."

"I don't know where we are."

"Redwater County. Northwest side. Closest town is Millard."