She was vibrating with a tremor so violent I could audibly hear her teeth clicking together. Her hair, which she religiously maintained in a pristine, professional chignon for her corporate job, hung in a wild, tangled curtain around her pale face. Despite the oppressive summer heat radiating off the asphalt, she was buried inside an oversized, heather-gray sweatshirt, paired with faded denim and scuffed sneakers. The sleeves were pulled down to her knuckles, attempting to swallow her hands entirely.
But the fabric wasn’t long enough. As she gripped the doorframe for balance, my eyes locked onto the sickening, mustard-yellow perimeter of a deep contusion blooming near her delicate wrist.
“Em?” I breathed, immediately stepping backward to clear the threshold. “What in God’s name happened?”
She shuffled past me without uttering a single syllable, moving with a stiff, agonizing caution, as if the sheer act of placing one foot in front of the other sent shockwaves of pain up her spine. When I firmly shut the door and flipped the harsh fluorescent kitchen light on, she flinched violently, raising an arm to shield her face.
That was the exact moment the shadows retreated, revealing the true canvas of her suffering. The left side of her cheek was visibly swollen, the skin a mottled canvas of purple and blue barely concealed beneath a frantic, smeared application of expensive foundation that tears had already washed away. As she lowered her arm, the heavy collar of the sweatshirt shifted, exposing another jagged bruise tracking aggressively along the line of her collarbone.
“Don’t,” she whispered, her voice a hollow, raspy fraction of its normal cadence. “Please, Sarah. Just… don’t ask me.”
