Pacifier

🌿Van🌹

This cottage was always supposed to be a haven, a sanctuary. Somewhere to take cover.

But not like this and not now. Not when the family was falling apart. Not when death was the long shadow in the day and the disturbance in the night.

I kept Izzy close and the doors locked. If we opened a window we didn't leave the room until we'd closed it.
Curtains drawn at all times. We were fugitives in hiding and I hated it. Hated not knowing how confident we could be. Hated not knowing who we'd lost.

Izzys leg was healing slowly. I didn't want her walking on it too soon but I knew that if she'd needed to she could. Still, it was going to take time. A whole lot of time I couldn't help but feel we didn't have and to look at her was agony because it could have been different had I done things differently.

I'd braved leaving her alone only once since we had arrived. Once the morning after we'd arrived in the dead of night. To walk to the house down the lane, offer them money to drive into town and pick up my groceries. I'd had to tell a clever lie, one about having no fuel in the tank, one about not knowing the area so well. One about how I'd come to care for Grandma who had had a fall.

I'd given them money and met them outside their house a mile an a half from ours, and when they'd offered to help carry the bags I'd said no, grinned and made a joke. Enough to ease them into a goodbye with a friendly offer from then. Anything you need just knock on the door.

But I was hoping this would all be over by the time we needed groceries again.

Izzy lay with her head in my lap, sleeping peacefully. Or as peacefully as she did these days.

I could tell by the furrow of her brow that her sleep was strained and stressful just like mine. Though I didn't get much of that these days.

Ain't no rest for the wicked as they say.

With my fingers intertwined in her hair i watched the rolling news the, same as I did every day.

With all connections to the city lost but for my connection with Sam the news was my only way of knowing who was gone and who might come stumbling up to our front door any day now.

I knew that if anybody died they'd make the news. Unknown kids make the news all the time when they're caught in the crossfire. But one of ours, when we'd made a name so infamous over the years, well their face would be flickering on every TV screen and it wouldn't be with sympathy they were spoken of.

Still at least I would know.

Izzy stirred in my lap, her hair shifting across my jeans. Her eyes moving under her eyelids as if she were lost to a dream.

And when she awoke she awoke with the smallest of sighs and looked up at me from under droppy sleepy lashes. For a moment I was able to lose myself to my adoration for her. For a fleeting second I was able to think only of her and not of the horrors we were hiding from in her mothers cottage.

"Have you heard anything?" she asked, her voice feathery with sleep.

I swallowed a lump in my throat, hoped she didn't notice as I tried to decide how truthful I wanted to be. How truthful I could afford to be in a moment like this when I had heard something, but not heard enough to be honest with her.

Still, she wasn't the girl me and her Bond had cornered her into being all these years. I knew that now. She'd been through more than enough, and another lie wouldn't save her. Reality has a harsh way of catching up to even the most beautifully naive.

"Sam called," I said, unease clutching at my stomach, gripping my insides in a way which made me feel all too human. All too vulnerable. "Della is alright, he wants to get her out the city,"