Page 51 of Open Road

She spins from the mirror. The surprise on her face goes through several things at once— embarrassment, the flinch older than embarrassment, then the rapid reassembly of composure. She’s very good at composure, and it took her a long time to build.

“Roam—”

“Stay there.”

She goes still but not from fear. I know the difference now and have been learning the difference for three weeks. This stillness is something else. It’s assessment. Reading what she sees in my face before she decides what it means.

I don’t look away from her reflection.

The mirror gives me a different angle on her than a direct view. Straight-on, Janie is composed. She holds herself in a particular way with her chin up, shoulders set, the posture of awoman who learned to take up as little space as possible and then decided to take up exactly the right amount as a form of resistance. That posture is something I’ve watched with a respect that I haven’t found words for.

The mirror shows me the part she doesn’t manage.

Her eyes.

The bruising is gone now, but its shape I still know. She stands with one hand at the edge of the towel, not holding it closed since she tied it. The hand is there because she doesn’t know where else to put it.

She’s waiting for me to look away.

I don’t.

I won’t.

“Roam.” She’s quieter now. There’s something, almost a warning in it, the voice of a woman who has decided this is embarrassing and would like to be permitted to be embarrassed privately. “I was just—”

“You were saying his words.”

The silence is absolute.

Her eyes in the mirror go through something. I watch it move across her face, not a flinch, past flinching, the particular stillness of a person who has been accurately seen and doesn’t know yet whether accuracy is safe.

“You heard,” Janie says.

“Yes.”

She breathes. Once. “How long?”

“Long enough.”

She looks down at the basin. I let her have that for a moment because what I’m about to do is something I’ve been turning over since I heard the tone of her voice through the door, and it needs to come out right, or it won’t land.

I cross the tile floor, and she looks up when I get close. I’m looking at her reflection, and she looks at mine.

“Tell me what you see,” I say.

“Roam.”

“Janie.” Her name in my mouth is still something I’m careful with. She gave it to me on the side of a highway at three in the morning, the name she uses when she’s choosing to trust someone, chosen in the dark with a three-year-old at her side and no reason yet to think this was going to end well. “Tell me what you see.”

“I know what you’re doing.”

“Then it should be easy.”

She holds my eyes in the mirror for a long moment. Her jaw sets the way it sets when she’s deciding something. It’s not a wall going up, but the opposite, allowing the decision to let a thing be seen.

“I see someone who looks tired,” she says, leveled and controlled. “Someone in the middle of something she didn’t plan for, in someone else’s house—”

“No,” I say quietly. “His words, not yours.”