She had not always been so afraid of ordinary sounds. Before Brandon, she liked the apartment's position above Main Street. She liked hearing delivery trucks in the morning, students laughing outside the hardware store, and the music from the town's summer festival drifting up through her open windows. She had painted the kitchen cabinets herself and bought secondhand chairs at a church sale. The apartment was not much to look at, but it was the first place she had rented without help, and she had loved it for that reason.
Brandon gradually changed the meaning of every room. The kitchen became the place where he checked her phone while she cooked. The hallway became the place where arguments continued after she asked him to leave. The bedroom became the place where she lay awake listening to his truck outside and wondering whether he would come upstairs. She stopped inviting friends over because she never knew what mood he would be in. She stopped listening to music loudly enough to hear from the street because Brandon said it made her seem careless.
The worst part was how completely she had learned to anticipate him. She could hear the difference between the way he placed his keys on the counter when he wanted affection and the way he placed them there when he wanted a fight. She could tell from the first word of a telephone call whether he had been drinking. Sometimes she caught herself inventing explanations before anything had happened, preparing for accusations that might never arrive. It was exhausting work, the kind no one recognized because it produced nothing visible except an ordinary-looking day.
Cole's intervention had frightened her almost as much as it had relieved her. For several seconds, seeing Brandon on the diner floor, she had imagined everything that might happen afterward. He might come to the apartment. He might call his uncle. He might hurt someone Cole cared about. He might punish Lily for the way other people had seen him. Relief was there, but it was tangled in fear, and she resented herself for not feeling the clean happiness that the people around her seemed to expect.
She opened the message thread with Anna. Her sister had sent photographs of a new puppy weeks earlier and asked when Lily was coming to Billings. Lily had answered with a laughing emoji and an excuse about work. Now she typed, I need to tell you something, then erased it. She typed, Can I come stay with you for a little while? and erased that too. In the end, she called.
Anna answered with a groggy voice. "Lily? It's late. Is everything okay?"
The question undid her. She started crying before she could form a sentence, and for a moment she was seventeen again, standing beside Anna at their mother's funeral and trying to make herself useful so she would not have to admit how frightened she was.