Chapter 4
Savannah didn’t hand me her phone.
She kept it in her own hands, the screen tilted toward herself, and after a while she opened the folder again. I stayed where I was, on the far side of the bed, close enough to see the dates when she chose to show me and far enough not to crowd her.
“I sorted them,” she said. “Not by what happened. By when.”
A faint line appeared between her brows as she scrolled. She had gathered the notes into groups, not neat enough to make them look simple. Dates repeated in clusters, with quiet stretches between them. The shape of it was harder to look at than any one entry.
She paused on a photograph, then turned the phone slightly so I could see. A purple bruise marked the inside of her arm. The image was close and carefully framed; there was no face, no caption explaining it away.
“I remember this one,” I said.
“I know.”
Her voice was flat, not cruel. That made the words land harder.
I recognized the week. I’d been working late more than usual, coming home after the building’s windows had turned black. Bernice had been there while I was gone. I had thought that meant Savannah had company.
Savannah tapped the screen and moved to another entry. The date fell in a week I’d traveled for work. The next one came during a string of evenings when I’d stayed at the office.
“I’m not saying every time you weren’t here, something happened,” she said. “I’m showing you the pattern I found.”
“I understand.”
“No. Just look first.”
So I did.
The notes were brief. A bruise. A burn near her ankle. A fall in the bathroom. Beside some were photographs; beside others, a saved record from a medical visit or a message she had sent herself. The details did not line up into a perfect account, and Savannah didn’t try to make them. She kept the phone and chose what to open.
On one photo, the edge of the kitchen counter appeared behind her arm. Another showed pale tile and the corner of a familiar bath mat. I knew both places. I couldn’t tell from an image exactly where an injury had happened, and I wouldn’t pretend I could.
But Savannah’s notes returned to the same rooms.
“The kitchen,” she said, watching me notice. “The hallway. The bathroom.”
I looked from the screen to the open doorway. Those were the rooms I crossed every day without thinking about what they might hold for her when I was gone.
“How often did she—”
I stopped.
Savannah’s thumb rested over the screen. “I don’t know how often you want me to say it.”
“I don’t want you to say anything you don’t want to.”
“Then don’t ask for a number.”
“I won’t.”
She let the silence sit. The phone stayed in her hands.
“I kept this because I needed something I could look at when she told me it hadn’t happened the way I remembered,” she said. “Or when I started telling myself I was making too much of it.”
My throat tightened. I wanted to reach for her hand, to show her I was there. I remembered what she had told me: don’t touch me unless I ask. So I stayed still.
“You shouldn’t have had to keep a record just to trust yourself,” I said.
Her eyes lifted to mine. There was no comfort in them, but there was attention. She was waiting to see what I did with the truth once it had been placed between us.
I looked back at the dates.
The clusters were not proof of every moment, and they didn’t tell me everything that had happened. They did tell me that this was not one bad afternoon, not a single loss of control brought on by a crowded home or a difficult pregnancy. The entries stretched backward through years. They gathered around Bernice’s access to Savannah and around the hours I was away.
Nearly three years.
The thought came with a sickening sense of scale. Not a secret held for one terrible day, but a life Savannah had kept moving through while I accepted the explanations that asked the least of me.
“Did you know I was traveling those weeks?” I asked.
“I knew when you were gone.”
I nodded. It was not an answer I could improve by defending myself. I had been gone. Bernice had been home. Savannah had been there, too.
She scrolled farther back. Her pace slowed at an older note, then stopped.
“This one,” she said. “There was a crash.”
The room seemed to narrow around the words.
I remembered it at once: the sudden clatter from the kitchen, sharp enough that I’d looked up from my laptop. A pause followed. Then Bernice’s voice, light and dismissive, telling me something had fallen.
I had stayed at the table.
“What did you write?” I asked.
Savannah read the entry silently. Her face changed, just slightly, as if she had reached a part of the memory she wasn’t ready to carry aloud. She locked the phone, then unlocked it again. She did not turn it toward me until she chose to.
The note was short. It named the crash, the kitchen, and the date. There were no details about what had fallen or what had happened afterward.
“I remember hearing it,” I said.
“I know.”
“Your mother told me something had broken.”
“She told you I was clumsy.”
The word struck a place in my memory I hadn’t expected. Not because I remembered the crash itself more clearly, but because I remembered Bernice’s tone afterward: amused, affectionate, the kind of teasing that made a person feel foolish for taking offense.
I had believed the tone instead of asking the question.
“I should have come in,” I said.
Savannah looked down at her phone. “You heard her explanation and stayed where you were.”
“Yes.”
No excuse rose up—not work, not exhaustion, not the assumption that my mother would tell me if someone needed help. They were all pieces of the same choice: I had decided an easy answer was enough.
Savannah set the phone on the bed beside her, still within her reach. Then she opened the timeline again and tapped a date near the beginning of the entries.
“I didn’t put this one first because it was the worst,” she said. “I put it first because it’s where I started writing things down.”
I leaned forward, stopping before I crossed the space between us.
The date was visible at the top of the note.
May you like
I knew it. I remembered that evening, the crash from the kitchen, Bernice’s easy explanation—and the first time she called Savannah clumsy.
January 14.
