Chapter 29

Neve

The kitchen at five-thirty in the morning is the only place in this house where I can breathe.

It’s warm. It smells like yeast and coffee. Lena hums under her breath and never asks me anything she doesn’t need to know. The work is simple and endless: peel, chop, scrub, stir, carry. My hands know what to do even when my head is somewhere else, and for a few hours every morning, nobody looks at me at all.

I’ve been back a week. My guards change every eight hours: Jory, who still goes red whenever I look at him; Tanner, who never says a word; and Eli, who’s from Oregon and talks enough for all three of them. None of them hover. They sit by the back door, or at the end of the hall, and let me be.

I have a phone now. It lives in my back pocket and buzzes at least thirty times a day, almost always Ellie. Photos of hairstyles. Photos of her lunch. A picture of a dog she saw outside the salon, captioned HIM. I don’t always answer. She doesn’t seem