I’m just putting my things back where they belong.
Out of your way. He stared at it until his hand went still, and the sound of his mother’s voice seemed to reach him from very far underwater.
I have wondered, since, what actually moved in him in that moment — whether it was guilt, or only the dawning arithmetic of what my leaving would cost him.
I suspect it was both, tangled the way they always are in a man who was never cruel so much as comfortably blind.
Shane had not hated me.
That was almost the worst of it.
If he had hated me I could have understood it, fought it, left it cleanly.
Instead he had simply never once been curious about me — never wondered what the seamless running of his life required, never noticed the woman keeping the machine oiled because a working machine makes no sound.
He had accepted my labor the way you accept gravity, as a background condition of the universe, and he had accepted his mother’s cruelty toward me the same way, as weather, as just-how-Mom-is.
The photograph of my bruised face was, I think, the first time in five years he had actually looked at me — really looked, at the cost of what he’d let happen.