The Weight of Silence
The water hit her shoulders like static, a thousand tiny needles that shouldn't have hurt but did. Emily stood beneath the spray with her eyes closed, counting the way she'd been counting for seventeen days now — one, two, three, four — a trick she'd read about once in a magazine article about panic attacks, though nobody had ever told her what to do when the counting stopped working.
It didn't work. Not really. But it gave her hands something to do besides shake.
The bathroom had gone thick with steam, fogging the mirror above the sink, and for a moment she was grateful for that small mercy — she wouldn't have to look at herself yet. She let the water run hotter than she should have, until her skin flushed an angry pink, because sometimes if it was hot enough she could almost believe she was feeling something normal, something that belonged to her and not to him.
His hands. She shoved the thought down hard, the way she'd gotten good at shoving things down, packing them into some airless room in the back of her skull and slamming the door before they could climb out and take shape. But the water kept betraying her. It always seemed to find the exact places his fingers had been,…
