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The next year drags slow and jagged, each day bleeding into the next with no clean edges, no seams to tell one from another. Time here doesn’t stretch forward—it is a heavy, pink-tinted void where nothing begins or ends. The books on the shelf have long stopped being stories. Their words dissolve as I read them, the letters turning into shapes, the shapes into noise. But I read them anyway, over and over, hoping the repetition will tether me to something real. Anything.

But the only real thing is my voice, thin and trembling in the dark, whispering apologies to a father who will never hear them.

I didn’t think about my dad much before this room. He was always on the edges of my life, a figure of quiet disappointment. He lived in the sighs he let out when I told him I wasn’t coming home for Thanksgiving, knowing he’d get drunk and unravel the night. But now, in the pink glow of this room, he is everything.

At night, when the silence wraps itself around me like a second skin, I lie on the bed with its scratchy quilt and press my face into the pillow. I whisper to him, my voice breaking on the same

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promises, over and over: If I get out of here, the first thing I’ll do is call you.

I hold his face in my mind like a photograph I’m scared to lose. The crow’s feet that deepened when he smiled. The way he’d squint at the horizon, refusing to admit he needed glasses. His hands, rough and steady, fixing things I didn’t know were broken.

The last time I saw him, he hugged me awkwardly, his arms too loose, like he wasn’t sure I wanted to be held. I replay that hug constantly, looping it like a lifeline, imagining what it would feel like to step into it again.

Some nights, Kennedy finds her way into my thoughts. I imagine her at her kitchen table, scrolling through my dead social media accounts, trying to stitch together clues that don’t exist. Her determination feels like both a gift and a curse. I wonder if she’s angry with me, if she hates me for leaving without a word. I hate myself for all the things I didn’t say, every message I didn’t send. If I could go back to that afternoon in her backyard, I would tell her everything. Maybe she would have stopped me.

The rest of my life slips away slowly, like a photograph left too long in the sun. My apartment, with its drafty windows and creaky floors, feels distant, its edges fraying. I can’t remember the exact shade of my couch, the smell of my favorite candle, or the way the light spilled through the blinds in the late afternoon. The details fade, one by one, until my life feels like a dream I once had but can’t hold onto.

Master Nathan’s moods swing like a pendulum. His grin, wide and sharp, is as unpredictable as his anger. On his good days, he lets me crawl into the kitchen for a bowl of lukewarm oatmeal. On his bad days, he locks the door behind him and makes me sit in silence as he lectures me on obedience, his voice slicing the air, sharp and unforgiving.

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But it’s not the punishments that hurt the most. It’s the absence of everything else. The way the world beyond this room collapses in on itself, shrinking until it feels like it was never real. It feels like trying to remember a melody I haven’t heard in years—familiar but just out of reach.

I start talking to the stuffed animals on the bookshelf. The rabbit becomes my favorite, its stitched eyes lopsided, its fur dirty and matted. At night, I clutch it to my chest, its small, soft body soaking up my tears.

If I ever get out of here, the first thing I’ll do is call my dad. I whisper it like a prayer, like an incantation.

My voice cracks, trembling under the weight of words I don’t know how to say. I bury my face into the rabbit’s fur, whispering so softly it feels like the room itself is swallowing my voice. “I’ll tell him I miss him.”

Some nights, in the quiet, I think I hear his voice. It comes faint, like a thread stretched too thin, but steady. Gia, he says, low and certain, like he’s standing just outside the door. It’s time to come home.