Chapter 7: The First Steps
The shame had cooled into something worse, a hollow that sat behind my sternum and refused to move. I stood in front of the full-length mirror on the closet door, naked, and tried to remember whose body I was looking at. The honey-blonde hair. The round face. The blue eyes that blinked when I blinked. The locket at my throat, cold as a lie.
I had to get dressed. That was the next thing. Get dressed, go outside, walk the property line like a normal person settling into a normal life. Deputy Cole had been friendly. Would probably check on me again. I needed to look like someone who belonged here, not a ghost wearing somebody else's skin.
The dresser drawers held folded stacks of clothes, all in my size. All in her size. I pulled open the second drawer and reached in without looking, my fingers closing around a tangle of straps and lace. When I lifted it out, my face dropped.
The tag read 34DDD.
I stared at the bra in my hands, at the cups that looked large enough to hold melons, and then I looked down at myself. I had seen myself in this mirror before. I had touched myself in this body, explored it in the dark, wept over it. But seeing the number, the official acknowledgment of scale, hit different. That bra wasn't meant for a man. It wasn't meant for anything I had ever been. It was made for her, for Sabrina Parker, for these breasts that hung heavy on my chest and swayed when I moved in ways I still couldn't predict.
I almost threw it back in the drawer. I wanted to. My hand actually lifted, ready to toss the lace thing away and pretend I hadn't seen it. But my fingers didn't let go. They clenched around the straps, and I let out a breath that came out shaky from these lungs, these ribs, this body that breathed without asking my permission.
"You live here now," I said to the mirror. My voice was still strange to me, soft and light where Justin's had been low and gravelly. "You live in this body. So learn to dress it."
The clasp was at the back. I had seen women do this a hundred times, a flick of the wrists, and it was done. My hands went behind me, fingers fumbling at the hooks. They slipped. I tried again. The bra twisted, the straps tangled around my elbows, and I had to stop, shake my arms free, and start over. On the fourth attempt I managed to hook the first row, but the band sat wrong, too high, and I had to unhook it and try again.
My arms ached by the time I got it settled. The underwire pressed against my ribs, an unfamiliar cage. The straps cut into my shoulders. I looked in the mirror and saw a woman in a lace-trimmed bra, breasts lifted and pushed together in a way I hadn't seen on myself before, cleavage that looked almost obscene.
I could feel my face flush. This was ridiculous. I had bigger problems than a bra that didn't fit right. I had a new name, a new history, a whole new life built on a lie. And yet there I was, wrestling with lingerie like it mattered.
Maybe it did. Maybe this was the first step of the sentence I was serving: learning to inhabit the costume they'd given me.
I pulled on the olive tank top from the first drawer, the cropped one that left my midriff bare. The fabric stretched tight across my chest, and I had to tug at the hem to make it lie flat. Then the dark denim jeans, which I had to wiggle into, the denim clinging to my hips and thighs like a second skin. The buttons were a struggle. My fingers, still clumsy in this body, kept missing the hole. I finally got them done up and zipped, and the waistband sat low on my hips, snug enough to remind me that every curve was real.
The boots were in the bottom of the closet, a pair of worn brown leather work boots that looked small, impossibly small. They fit my feet perfectly. I laced them up, double-knotted them, and stood.
The woman in the mirror looked like she could walk into any small town and be swallowed by it. Pretty. Curvy. Young. The kind of woman nobody would look at twice except to admire. That was the point, I supposed. Nothing about Sabrina Parker was remarkable enough to warrant suspicion. She was designed to disappear.
I grabbed the locket and adjusted it at my throat, where it rested against my collarbone, a small silver weight I still hadn't opened. Rachel's letter had mentioned it. A gift from my fabricated parents, one that passed to me after they died in the fire that never happened. I didn't want to open it. I wasn't ready to see whatever face they'd put inside.
The front door creaked when I pushed it open, and the morning hit me full in the face: warm, bright, smelling of cut grass and damp earth. I stepped out onto the porch, my boots thunking on the wooden planks, and then down the three steps to the yard.
The grass was overgrown, reaching past my knees in places. My calves brushed against it as I walked, the blades tickling my skin above the boot tops. I could feel my hips swaying with each step, a rhythm I hadn't asked for and couldn't stop. This body moved like it had a purpose, and I was just along for the ride.
The tree line was maybe fifty yards from the house, a wall of maples and pines that marked the edge of the property. There was a path cutting through the grass, worn and faint, leading toward the woods. I followed it, my hands shoved in my pockets, the morning sun heating my bare shoulders and the strip of exposed midriff between tank and jeans.
Each step was a reminder. The bounce of my chest against the bra. The way the denim hugged my thighs. The soft curve of my hips under my palms. I was a stranger in this body, and every movement, every sensation, told me so.
I reached the treeline and stopped. A deer trail wound into the shadows, and I could smell the coolness of the forest, the rot of leaves and the sweetness of pine. Somewhere deeper, water ran, a stream or creek that I hadn't explored yet. The river from my dream. The one where I'd watched myself drown.
I stood there, breathing, listening to the quiet. No cars. No voices. Just the birds and the wind and the beat of my own heart. This was the life they'd built for me. This isolation, this silence. A beautiful body in a forgotten corner of Vermont, waiting for the world to forget her.
I didn't know how long I stood there. Long enough for the sun to climb higher, for my shadow to shorten. Long enough to feel the weight of the new life pressing down on me, the knowledge that this was permanent, that Justin Zygurski was gone, erased, and Sabrina Parker was all that remained.
I turned and looked back at the farmhouse, at the curtains stirring in the open window, at the chimney that had never smoked, at the garden that had never been planted. Home, the file said. This was home now.
I walked back through the tall grass, feeling the sway of my hips, the bounce of my step, the locket cold against my throat. And I kept walking, because there was nowhere else to go.
The walk back to the farmhouse took me past the side of the house, where the grass gave way to packed dirt and gravel, and that's when I saw the barn. I had noticed it from the kitchen window that morning, a sagging red structure sitting about thirty yards past the garden plot, but I hadn't thought much of it. Now, standing in the yard with the sun climbing higher, I found myself walking toward it, my boots crunching on the gravel.
The barn door was a wide sliding affair, painted red that had faded to a dusty pink. It took both hands to slide it open, the wheels grinding on their track, and the smell that rushed out was hay and dust and old grease. I stepped inside, letting my eyes adjust to the dim light that filtered through gaps in the boards.
And there she was.
A white Jeep Wrangler, late model, sitting in the center of the barn like it had been waiting for me. Vermont plates on the back, a thin layer of dust on the hood. I walked around to the driver's side and peered through the window. Keys in the ignition, a pair of sunglasses on the passenger seat, a folded map on the dash. The fabric top looked new. The tires had plenty of tread.
This was Sabrina's car. Her transportation. Her ticket to town, to groceries, to escape if she needed it. I ran my fingers along the door handle, feeling the cool metal, and tried to picture myself behind the wheel. A woman in a cropped tank top and tight jeans, driving a Jeep through the Vermont hills. It was almost funny. Almost.
I left the Jeep and walked deeper into the barn. The concrete floor was cracked and stained, and the air grew cooler the further I went. A tractor sat against the far wall, an old John Deere with a mower deck attached, the green paint faded but the metal solid. I touched the seat, felt the cracked vinyl, wondered if the engine still turned over. Maybe I'd find out. Maybe not.
And then I saw it. In the corner, half hidden behind a stack of hay bales that had long since collapsed into a musty heap, there was a shape under a canvas tarp. The tarp was heavy, olive green, weighed down by a cinder block on one corner. It covered something long and low, something with the unmistakable outline of a vehicle.
I crossed the barn and lifted the cinder block off, then grabbed the edge of the tarp and pulled. Dust exploded into the air, choking me, and I coughed, waving my hand in front of my face. The tarp slid off and crumpled to the floor, and I stared.
A 1966 Ford pickup. F-100, if I had to guess, with that classic rounded cab and the long bed. The paint was a faded turquoise that had turned to bare metal in patches, and the bumpers were pitted with rust. The windshield was cracked in one corner, the tires flat and dry rotted. It looked like it had been parked here decades ago and forgotten.
But it was all there. The grill. The headlights. The tailgate with the tail lights intact. I walked around to the front and lifted the hood, the hinges groaning in protest. The engine bay was dusty, cobwebbed, but the block sat there complete: heads, intake manifold, carburetor, even the air cleaner. Everything a man could want if he knew how to fix it.
I had known how to fix things, once. Justin had grown up in a garage, his father a mechanic who'd taught him to rebuild carburetors before he could drive. He had spent his teenage years under hoods, his twenties putting them back together. It had been years since I'd thought about any of it, buried under spreadsheets and tax codes and the quiet gray life of an accountant. But the knowledge was still there, coiled in the back of my mind, waiting for a reason to surface.
I pulled my hand back, looked at my fingers. Slender, tapering, nails neatly trimmed and unpainted. Sabrina's hands. But they remembered torque specs and gap sizes. They remembered what a distributor cap looked like before it was installed, remembered the feel of a ratchet slipping over a bolt head.
I walked around the truck again, slower this time. The bed was rusted but solid. The cab had a bench seat covered in cracked red vinyl, a perfect split down the middle. I reached in through the open window and touched the steering wheel, the wide three-spoke kind they made back then, and felt something shift in my chest. Not the hollow shame I'd been carrying all morning. Something else. Something like a spark catching.
I didn't know if the engine turned over. I didn't know if the transmission was stuck, if the brakes were seized, if the wiring was intact. But everything was here. Every part. Every bolt. And for the first time since I'd woken up in this body, I had a clear idea of what I was going to do with a day.
I let my hand rest on the fender, feeling the cool metal under my palm. The truck was a mess. It needed hours and hours of work, weeks maybe, months if I was doing it right. New tires, new wiring, new lines, a rebuild on that old engine. It was the kind of project that would swallow a person whole, that would keep him up at night with planning and parts lists and the quiet satisfaction of progress measured in small victories.
A distraction. A beautiful, distracting project with gears and grease and problems I could actually solve.
The barn felt different now. Warmer. The dust still hung in the air, and the light still filtered through the cracks, but the space had meaning. The Jeep was there for errands, for town, for pretending to be Sabrina Parker. But the truck... the truck was for me. For the part of me that still knew how to make something run.
I grabbed the tarp and covered the truck back up, smoothing it down, pressing the cinder block back onto the corner. Then I stood there a moment longer, letting my breathing settle, letting the idea take root.
There was a toolbox in the barn too, I noticed now, a red metal chest pushed against the wall near the tractor. I walked over and opened it. The tools were old but well cared for, a full socket set, wrenches, screwdrivers, a breaker bar. Whoever had owned this place had taken their tools seriously.
I picked up a socket wrench and felt its weight in my hand, so familiar it made my chest ache. I had learned something here. Something I hadn't even known I needed to know.
I closed the toolbox and left the barn, sliding the door shut behind me. The sun was bright on my face, and the yard stretched out green and quiet. I walked back toward the house, my hips swaying, my boots crunching on the gravel, the locket cold against my throat.
But there was something else in my step now. A purpose. A reason to get out of bed that wasn't just surviving another day in this borrowed body.
I had a truck to fix.