The house in Maine was actually a cabin. It smelled like pine needles and the kind of old wood that's absorbed decades of woodsmoke. It was small—one room and a loft that required a ladder that felt like it was going to snap every time she climbed it.
Lena had been there for six weeks.
Most days were boring. She woke up when the sun hit the loft window, she fed Barnaby, and she walked down to the mailbox at the end of the long, dirt driveway. The mailbox was always empty. She didn't know why she kept checking it. Adrian didn't have the address. Nobody had the address.
She'd spent the first week jumping every time a pinecone hit the roof. Now, she just sighed and went back to whatever she was doing. She spent a lot of time sweeping. The dust in the cabin seemed to come out of the walls, a fine, grey powder that settled on everything. It gave her something to do with her hands.
"I'm going to the store," she told Barnaby one Tuesday. The cat was busy chasing a moth and didn't look at her. He'd gotten fat on the expensive salmon Adrian's money bought. He was the only one who didn't seem to miss the city.
She drove the old truck Adrian's contact had left for her. It was a rusted-out Ford that smelled like wet dog, but the heater worked. The town was five miles away. It had one grocery store, a gas station, and a diner where the coffee tasted like it had been sitting on the burner since the Nixon administration.
Lena stood in the grocery aisle, staring at a wall of cereal boxes. She didn't know which one she liked. For three years, she'd eaten whatever Julian brought home, or whatever was left over at the Lounge. She realized she didn't actually have a favorite cereal. It was a weird, hollow feeling. To be thirty years old and not know what you want for breakfast because you spent your whole life being told what you needed.
Internal thoughts are scattered. Cornflakes? No. Too crunchy. Maybe the ones with the raisins. Do I like raisins? I think I do. Julian hated them. He used to pick them out of the muffins. He'd leave a little pile of them on his napkin like they were poisonous. I'm thirty years old and I don't know if I like raisins.
She bought the ones with the raisins.
When she got back to the cabin, she sat on the porch for an hour. The woods were loud. Birds screaming, the wind in the branches, the sound of the ocean hitting the rocks somewhere down the cliff. It was a different kind of noise than the subway. It didn't demand anything from her.
She sat at the small table and stared at the silver drive. She still hadn't done anything with it. She hadn't called the police. She hadn't mailed it to a newspaper. It just sat there on the wood, looking like a piece of junk. Sometimes she'd pick it up and feel the sharp edges. This was the thing men died for. This was why Julian was in the ground. It felt too light to be that important.
Sometimes she thought about Adrian. Not the "hero" version. She thought about the way he chewed his lip when he was thinking, or the way his hands shook when he thought she wasn't looking. She wondered if he was dead. Or if he was in a prison somewhere, staring at a different wall. She wondered if he'd ever actually made it to the border, or if he was just a ghost haunting that warehouse in Queens.
She felt a weird pang in her chest. It wasn't heartbreak, exactly. Heartbreak was sharp. This was more like a bruise that hadn't quite healed. She missed him. She missed the person she thought he was, and she even missed the person he actually turned out to be. A liar. A murderer. A man who let her brother die.
But she didn't want him there. Not really. She didn't want to have to look at him and remember.
She walked over to the mirror hanging by the door. She looked different. Her hair was longer, messy. She'd stopped wearing makeup because there was nobody to see it. Her skin was tan from walking on the beach, and she had a scratch on her arm from a bramble. She looked like someone who lived in the woods, not someone who worked in a club.
"You're okay," she whispered to her reflection.
The reflection didn't look convinced. It looked like it was waiting for a punchline. But it didn't look broken either. It just looked tired.
She went to the kitchen and poured herself a bowl of the raisin cereal. She didn't use a placemat. She didn't turn on the radio. She just sat in the quiet and ate. The cereal was okay. A bit too sweet, and the raisins were kind of chewy in a way she wasn't sure about. But it was hers.
"I like raisins," she said out loud. Her voice sounded strange in the empty room.
She finished the whole bowl, listening to the wind rattle the windowpanes. She wasn't waiting for a knight anymore. She wasn't waiting for a brother to come home and fix the bills or tell her which way the world was turning.
She was just sitting in a chair, eating cereal she'd bought with her own money in a house that didn't have any hidden cameras.
It was a small thing. A boring thing. But as she watched Barnaby finally catch the moth and then look confused about what to do with it, Lena realized she wasn't afraid of the dark anymore. The shadows were just shadows. They didn't have teeth.
She was alone, and for the first time in her life, she didn't feel like she was disappearing because of it. She was solid. She was there. And tomorrow, she'd wake up and buy some different cereal just to see if she liked that too.