to walking, picking up her pace. She’s not one to get scared, but she starts thinking of what-ifs. What if her husband is on to her, what if he is following her, what if he knows?
She tells herself he doesn’t know. He couldn’t know. She’s a very good liar; she’s learned how to silence her tells.
But what if the wife knows?
She isn’t sure what “Sam” tells his wife when he leaves. They don’t talk about things like that. They don’t talk much at all except for a few preliminary words to kick things off.
Don’t you look pretty.
I’ve been waiting for this all day.
They’re not in love. No one is leaving their spouse anytime soon. It’s nothing like that. For her, it’s a form of escapism, release, revenge.
Another noise comes. She turns and looks again—truly scared this time—but finds nothing. She’s jittery. She can’t shake the feeling of eyes on her.
She starts to jog, but soon trips over an untied shoe. She’s uncoordinated and nervous, wanting to be in the car with him, and not alone on the street. The street is dark, far too dark for her liking.
She senses movement out of the corner of her eye. Is something there? Is someone there? She asks, “Who’s there?”
The night is quiet. No one speaks.
She tries to distract herself with thoughts of him, of his warm, gentle hands on her.
She bends over to tie the shoe. Another noise comes from behind. This time when she looks, car lights surface on the horizon, going way too fast. There’s no time to hide.
PART ONE
DELILAH
NOW
I hear footsteps. They move across the ceiling above my head. My eyes follow the sound, but there ain’t nothing to see ’cause it’s just footsteps. That don’t matter none, though, because the sound of them alone is enough to make my heart race, my legs shake, to make something inside my neck thump like a heartbeat.
It’s the lady coming, I know, ’cause hers are the bare feet while the man always wears shoes. There’s something more light about her footsteps than his. They don’t pound on the floor like the man’s do. His footsteps are loud and low, like a rumble of thunder at night.
The man is upstairs now, too, ’cause I hear the lady talking to him. I hear her ugly, huffy voice say that it’s time to give us some food. She says it like she’s teed off about something we’ve done, though we’ve done nothing, not so far as I can tell.
At the top of the stairs, the latch unlocks. The door jerks suddenly open, revealing a scrap of light that hurts my eyes. I squint, see her standing there in her ugly robe and her ugly slippers, her skinny legs knobby-kneed and bruised. Her hair is mussed up. There’s a scowl on her face. She’s sore ’cause she’s got to feed Gus and me.
The lady bends at the waist, drops something to the floor with a clang. If she sees me hiding in the shadows, she don’t look at me.
This place where they keep us is shaped like a box. There’s four walls with a staircase that runs up the dead center of them. I know ’cause I’ve felt every inch of them rough, rutty walls with my bare hands, looking for a way out. I’ve counted the steps from corner to corner. There’s fifteen, give or take a few, depending on the size of my steps and if my feet have been growing or not. My feet have, in fact, been growing ’cause those shoes I came with no longer fit right. They stopped fitting a long time ago. I can barely get my big toe in them now. I don’t wear no shoes down here anymore ’cause I stopped wearing those ones when they hurt. I got one pair of clothes. I don’t know where they came from but they ain’t the same clothes I was wearing when I got to this place. Those stopped fitting a long time ago and then the lady went and got me new ones. She was put out about it, same as she’s put out about having to feed Gus and me.
I wear these same clothes every day. I don’t know what exactly they look like ’cause of how dark it is down here. But I do know that it’s baggy pants and a shirt that’s too short in the sleeves ’cause I’m forever trying to pull them down when I’m cold. When my stink reaches the lady’s