[Reaction.]
The pillow's wet, and she's wide-eyed awake in the darkness. The moon sliver-kisses the indoor of the trailer, and the night is going on forever. She knows she should get up, climb the ladder, go down, make tea. She doesn't move.
She blinks her way through, and it's all so familiar. Familiar, but not, but she's worked long enough to know that sometimes the people who pick you up aren't good people. Waking up, confused, scared, hurting, and she's done it all before, and over and over, and on repeat, but she's scared this time, and it's a new scared. She hasn't retched since the day after her wedding. That was it, and something akin to acceptance covers her like dust on a dirty road, kicked up by wind. She was always a different type of scared after that. She was a 'knee's up in the corner' type of scared. But this scared goes all, all, all the way to her belly, and she'd forgotten this type of scared. She'd really, really like to forget it again.
But escape, escape, escape, and she never did, not until the very, very end.
A rock, no, a brick, and there's another person there to protect, and she remembers that too. Except it was a gun, and not a brick, and the thing in her hand wavers like highways on the horizon do. The boy, the other boy, becomes two small faces in a window, noses pressed to glass and breath fogging the perfectly cleaned surface.
She didn't have anyone to stop her from watching the light go out in his eyes, not like the boy, and she wonders, as she shakes free of this, if that was a good thing. She doesn't believe the cops would do anything. The cops really never did anything.