Chapter Three: The Ritual
It happened every night.
I began to anticipate the door. Even on nights when I was exhausted, even when Damian held me close before sleep and I almost managed to convince myself the previous night had been some strange dream — I always heard it. The soft click of the latch. The quiet footsteps.
After the first week, I stopped asking why. Mrs. Hargrove never answered anyway. She would simply stand with her hands folded, watching, waiting, as if she were overseeing something perfectly routine.
“How long does this go on?” I asked her once, on the eighth night.
“Until it is complete,” she said.
“Until what is complete?”
She looked at me steadily. “Be patient, dear.”
Dear. As if she were fond of me.
During the days, life in the house was almost normal. Breakfast was served at eight. Damian and I took walks in the garden. His father, a quiet man who smelled of pipe tobacco, nodded at me over the newspaper each morning. The staff was efficient and invisible. If any of them knew what happened to me each night, no one showed it.
And Damian — Damian was warm. Attentive. Himself.
“You seem tired,” he said to me one afternoon, maybe two weeks in. We were sitting in the conservatory, cups of tea going cold between us. “Are you sleeping well?”
I looked at him — at the easy concern in his face, the slight furrow between his brows — and I thought: he doesn’t know. He cannot know. If he knew, he would stop it.
“I’m adjusting,” I said. “New house. New sounds.”
He covered my hand with his. “Give it time. This place grows on you.”
I smiled. I was already becoming good at smiling.
But my body was not adjusting. The skin on my legs and torso was in a permanent state of rawness. I moved carefully, dressed carefully. I found a jar of aloe in the bathroom and used it every morning, rubbing it in slowly, methodically, like tending to a wound. Because that is what it was.
At the end of the third week, I stopped feeling much of anything during the bath itself. That frightened me more than the pain had.
