Chapter 201: THE BODY KNOWS FIRST

AMARIS

I have been tired before.

I know tired. Tired and I have a long professional relationship. I know the tired that comes from one bad night, and the tired that comes from a week of bad nights stacked on top of each other like unwashed dishes, and the tired that comes from living through things that would have been a lot to live through even with a full night’s sleep going in. I have been every one of those kinds of tired since I arrived at Gravemoon, and I managed all of them, because managing is my primary skill set and I list it proudly on my internal resume.

This is not that.

This is sleeping eight full hours and waking up feeling like the sleep happened to somebody else. This is standing in the shower while the smell of my own soap — the same soap, the identical bar-shaped citizen that has lived in that dish since I moved into this room — does something hostile to my stomach that it has never once done before. This is sitting at the breakfast table in front of the food Mrs. Caroline made, good food, food that smelled perfectly reasonable from the doorway, and having my body decline the entire concept of it. Not refuse politely. Decline. Like a bureaucrat. Stamped, returned, no appeal process listed.

I drink the tea.

I look at the eggs.

I drink more tea.

Nia sits across from me, watching me not eat my eggs. I am not looking at her expression directly. I am aware of the expression the way you are aware of weather through a closed window, and I am keeping the window closed, because opening it means having a conversation I am not ready to have, and I am not ready to have it because having it would mean taking seriously a thing I have been strategically not taking seriously for approximately ten days, and I have grown comfortable in my denial. The denial has good light. I have hung curtains in it. I would like to remain.

The smells are the worst part.

Not bad smells. Normal smells. That is the insulting part. The pack house in the morning smells like coffee and wood polish and whatever the kitchen has going, the way it has smelled every morning since I arrived, and I was fine with every one of those smells for weeks.

Since about ten days ago, the coffee has turned on me.

The coffee smell specifically climbs into the back of my throat every morning and holds a small violent meeting there. So I have adjusted. Quietly. Strategically. I now take a route to the breakfast room that avoids passing the kitchen entirely — down the east stairs, through the far corridor, past the portrait of some ancestral Grave who judges me openly every morning and frankly has no room to talk given what I know about this family now.

I have been taking the long way to breakfast for ten days.

Ten days of detours. For a smell. And in my head I have built a beautiful explanation, load-bearing and freshly painted: stress. The body does things under stress. The body is a chaos machine. It responds to sustained pressure in bizarre and inconvenient ways, and I have had — let me gesture broadly at the last several weeks — a siege, a vote, a banishment, a witch down the hall, and three men, so it is perfectly reasonable, medically reasonable, that my body has chosen to express all of that through an inexplicable vendetta against coffee and a cold war with eggs.

That is a complete and reasonable explanation and I am standing fully behind it.

I am standing fully behind it while also counting backward in my head for the third time this week. Doing the math. The same math. Getting the same answer. And then folding the math up small and putting it away in the drawer where I keep things I am not ready to know, which is getting as full as Rowan’s.

I push the eggs around the plate.

“Amaris.”

“I am eating.”

“You are moving food in circles.”

“The circles are eating adjacent.”

Nia sets her cup down with the click of a woman transitioning from breakfast to business. I keep my eyes on my eggs. Outside the breakfast room window the morning is grey and damp and unhelpful, and I would very much like to be somewhere else, having a different conversation, or ideally no conversation, possibly in a different body, one that still respects coffee.

“When did you last feel normal,” she asks.

“I live in a pack house with three men who are all—” I stop myself one word before the cliff. “Normal is relative.”

“Amaris.”

“Nia.”

She puts her elbows on the table. Both of them. Deliberate. Then she watches me with the flat patience of a woman who has already reached a conclusion and is simply waiting for the rest of the room to arrive at it, and I hold her gaze for exactly as long as I can afford to, which turns out to be about two seconds, and go back to my eggs.

In my head, the math is knocking on the drawer.

“I’m fine,” I state.

“You’ve had three sips of tea and it’s been forty minutes.”

“I’m not very hungry.”

“You’re never not hungry.”

That is true. That is an annoying, documented, historically verifiable thing for her to say. I have eaten through grief, through fear, through a siege. I ate a full plate the morning after the vote. My appetite has survived everything this house has thrown at it. It has surrendered to nothing.

Until ten days ago.

I put my fork down.

I look at the eggs.

And I let myself, for one unguarded second, actually think about it. The last several weeks. The specific sequence of the last several weeks. The fireplace rug. The window. The morning light through the curtains. The math underneath all of it, patient, unbothered, giving me the same answer every time I run it no matter which direction I run it from, the way true things do.

Denial is a very comfortable place to live.

But it has a square footage limit. And I am standing with my back against the far wall of mine.

“I’m fine,” I state again.

I do not sound fine. Even I can hear that I do not sound fine. The sentence comes out wearing a costume of fine with the tags still on.

Nia does not push. That is the terrifying part. Nia pushes about everything — Nia has opinions about how I fold napkins — and she does not push this. She just picks her cup back up and drinks her tea and watches me over the rim of it, steady, patient, already knowing, and I can feel the watching land on me like a hand on the shoulder.

I look at my eggs.

I am going to have to do something about the math soon.

Not today.

Today I am going to drink my tea and avoid the coffee smell and be completely fine.