She went still, staring at him. ‘what does that mean?’ She couldn’t bear to assume, and then be wrong. After a moment she remembered the apple and kept eating, faster now. Was he planning to take her somewhere, have her arrested or something?
“It means that you can stay here,” he said with a small shrug. He moved over to the fridge and pulled out some meat as well as seasonings. “I’ll make you something to eat. You go sit on the couch for now.”
Clutching the remnants of the apple in one hand and the pencil and pad in the other, she obediently sat on the couch, positioning herself to watch him. Slowly, remembering to take a bite every now and then, she wrote out what she could remember. Her name, Summer. That she couldn’t remember her home, or her life. That someone was hunting her, someone she could sense as absence instead of presence.
For a long moment she watched him move around the kitchen, confident and sure, and her gaze was sad. Then she bent to the paper again. ‘I have nothing. No way to repay.’