His to protect, theirs to sacrifice

"Hmmm ohhh… baby." A female voice floated through my apartment door before I even got my key in the lock. "You are so good…. Yeah right there."

I stood in the hallway with my keys in my hand and my work bag on my shoulder and did not move.

"You like that," a voice that sounded exactly like Marcus said, with a tone I had never once heard from him in two years.

I told myself my ears were playing tricks. I told myself a lot of things in the three seconds I stood there before I pushed the door open.

The apartment was dim. I had not left it that way. I always leave the kitchen light on because Marcus insisted I left it off, said it helped with the electric bill, but I still did it anyway because I hated coming home to dark rooms. Everything was off.

I pushed the bedroom door and it swung open too easily, like even the door wanted me to see.

Marcus. It was really him. Two years of being with Marcus. His birthday coming up next month, I already bought the watch. But here he was, on our bed, in our apartment, the apartment I paid for because he was between jobs and I said it was fine, I can handle it, and instead he was here doing this.

The girl grabbed the sheet. He grabbed nothing. He just looked at me with this face like he was surprised but not sorry, like he was caught but not ashamed, and that look, that specific look, did something to me that shattered whatever hope I had left of us.

"Zara." He said my name like I was the problem.

I did not scream. I thought I would. I had always imagined that if something like this ever happened to me I would be the kind of woman who throws things, who says sharp devastating words, who burns the whole situation down with her voice. I just stood there. My bag slipped off my shoulder and hit the floor and I did not pick it up.

"It's not..." he started.

"Don't." I said it quietly and that scared me more than anything else. How quiet I was.

I picked up my bag. I walked back out. I sat on the hallway floor outside my own apartment, the apartment with my name on the lease, and I sat there for a long time. I could hear movement inside. Voices. Low and urgent. At some point I heard the front door open and close and I knew the girl was gone and then Marcus opened the door and found me still sitting on the floor.

He crouched down in front of me and started talking. I watched his mouth move. I heard sounds coming out. Something about loneliness and I wasn't present and this hasn't been working for a while and I caught words here and there like I was listening to a badly tuned radio.

"Are you hearing me?" he said.

"You need to leave," I said. "Tonight."

"Zara this is a conversation we need to...."

"I pay for this apartment Marcus. You need to leave tonight."

He left. Not immediately, there was more talking, more words I did not fully absorb, but eventually he packed a bag and left and I locked the door and sat on the kitchen floor because I could not make myself go into the bedroom.

I called Priya at some point. I do not remember deciding to call her, my phone was just at my ear and it was ringing.

"He was f**king someone in the apartment," I said when she picked up.

Silence. Then, "I'm coming over."

She arrived in twenty minutes with wine she did not open and food I did not eat and she sat on the kitchen floor with me without asking why we were on the floor. That is the thing about Priya. She just locates where you are and she goes there.

We sat there a long time.

"You need to get out of this city for a bit," she said eventually.

"I can't just leave."

"You literally can. Come home with me. Come to Wrenfield." She said it like it was already decided, like the conversation was just a formality. "Two weeks. Fresh air. Different walls. You need to not be here right now Zara."

I looked around the kitchen. My kitchen. The dish towels I picked. The magnets on the fridge from places we traveled. All of it suddenly felt like evidence.

"I have work," I said.

"So take leave. When's the last time you actually took leave?"

She had me there.

I told my manager I had a family emergency the next morning, which was not entirely a lie because Priya is family in every way that counts. He said take whatever time I needed and I felt guilty for about four seconds and then went home and packed a bag without looking at the bedroom for longer than necessary.

We left on a Thursday morning. Priya drove because she said I was in no state to and she was right. I kept zoning out in the passenger seat, watching the city thin out into highway and then into the kind of open flat land that makes you realize how compressed city living actually is. I had forgotten that space existed like this. That you could look out and see the actual horizon.

"How long has it been since you went back?" I asked her.

"Three years." She kept her eyes on the road. "Maybe four."

"That's a long time."

"Wrenfield doesn't really change," she said. "That's the thing about it."

I slept for most of the drive. Real sleep, the heavy kind, which surprised me because I had not slept properly since I found them. I woke up when the car slowed and the road changed texture and looked out the window and felt something shift in my chest.

The town was not what I expected.

When Priya said small town I pictured something tired and run down with a gas station and maybe a diner. Wrenfield was not that. It was clean in a way that felt deliberate, the buildings old but maintained, the streets wide, trees that looked like they had been there forever with roots probably breaking up the concrete underneath. There were people walking around, not many but some, and they looked arranged. Like everyone knew where to be.

"It's pretty," I said.

"Yeah." Priya said it without much feeling, which I noted.

We drove slowly through what I assumed was the main part of town and I rolled my window down because the air genuinely smelled different, green and cold and something else underneath that I could not name. A woman walking on the pavement glanced at the car and then looked again, longer, her eyes finding me specifically.

We stopped at a light and a man on a bicycle slowed beside us, looked straight at me through the open window, and made a face I can only describe as confusion mixed with something alert. Like a dog that hears a sound.

"That guy just stared at me, is there something on my face?" I said, touching my face. Maybe I had drooled while I was asleep.

"Ignore it, you are pretty he could just be admiring you."

"Priya it didn't look like flirting, what is wrong with his face. And an old lady was staring too, she cannot be flirting with me."

"Zara ignore it, this is why I didn't want to leave you alone, you are getting paranoid."

We drove on. An older woman outside a shop said something to the person next to her and they both looked at our car. I caught the word strange and it's her but nothing else.

"Why do people keep looking at me like that," I said. "And that is not my paranoid self speaking, you can see them all looking."

"Small town," Priya said. "New face. Everybody knows everyone here."

"That woman literally said I smelled strange, but I had my bath before coming. And how can she even smell me from there."

I smelled myself. It was fine.

Priya's hands shifted on the wheel. Just slightly. "You smell amazing sweetheart, old people here are weird about outsiders, don't take it personally."

I looked at her. She was watching the road with too much focus for a road this empty.

"Priya."

"We're almost at the house," she said. "You're going to love my mom's cooking."

I let it go. I was tired and my chest still had that bruised feeling from everything and I did not have the energy to push it. I turned back to the window. Another person on the pavement clocked me and turned away too fast.

The whole town had looked at me and I was very sure something was wrong and I had not imagined it.

The house was bigger than I expected, older too, the kind of house that has a personality, where the floors creak in specific spots and the windows don't sit quite flush in their frames. It felt lived in the way only old houses do. Priya pulled into the driveway, and before we were even fully there, the front door opened.

Her mother came out first. Small woman, Priya's same eyes, hair pulled back. She looked at Priya with this wide open relief, and then she looked at me, and the relief didn't disappear exactly, but it changed. Tightened. She pulled it back behind a smile that she placed carefully on her face.

"Zara," she said. "We've heard so much about you."

"Thank you for having me," I said.

Her hands when she took mine were cold. She held on a second too long.

Priya's brother was in the doorway. Maybe nineteen or twenty, tall, and he looked at me the same way the people in town had, that alert con