Lost In The Wild Blue

Miriam Lockhart begins every day the same way: she climbs out of bed, inspects her reflection in the bathroom mirror, and wonders if she’ll ever recognize the woman looking back at her again.

Relics of who she used to be live on in the alphabetical arrangement of the books on the shelves and the bed that’s never left unmade. When she was known as Mia, she was purpose and order, schedules and routines, ten minutes early for everything and the first one to raise her hand if she knew the answer to a question. Like a mouse trying to evade a hungry house cat, Miriam hugs the perimeter of every room she ever enters, is keenly aware of every exit, and never lingers long enough to be noticed.

Mia went to bed with the windows open, lulled to sleep by the rhythmic pitter-patter of rain or whistle of the cool night breeze through the trees; Miriam sleeps with a light on and her back against a wall.

Sometimes she digs her nails into her arm to see if she can still feel pain; sometimes she thinks about breaking something, a dinner plate, or maybe the traitorous bathroom mirror that insists on showing her the wrong reflection, but the impracticality of cleaning up the mess after always convinces her not to. It’s a reminder that Mia is still in there somewhere, even if she doesn’t quite know where.

She often fantasizes about gunning down the man who robbed Mia of her existence all over again, of avenging her, of damning him to a nebulous half-life as he had damned her. The look in Kilgrave’s eyes as he took his last breath is etched into her memory like a tattoo, and the relief in knowing that he was dead and gone was a high she could have coasted on for the rest of her life.

But highs don’t last forever; she learns this the hard way when she’s recognized in town one afternoon, and she plummets to the ground like a meteor on a crash course with earth.

She writes a letter and sends it to every post office in the state, seeking help from the one person who understands, knows what it means to be touched by an iron hand in a velvet glove as well as she does. Days pass with no response, a week, then two, and her last bastion of hope collapses like a house of cards.

She stops leaving the house except to check the mail, and she keeps the curtains drawn. She doesn’t think about outlaws from New Austin with blue eyes and distinguishing scars, except for when she does.

Everything changes the morning a man on a silver horse rides up to her cottage on the outskirts of Valentine. Drawn to her kitchen window by the dull thud of hooves plodding closer to her door, she peers through the warped glass with her heart in her throat, her distorted reflection gaping dumbfounded at her unexpected visitor, and she takes an unconscious step back as if there’s a safe distance at which the world will make sense again.

Fate has come calling, but the messenger isn’t who she expects, and she convinces herself that he’ll vanish as soon as she blinks. Like an oasis in the middle of an arid, sprawling desert, the image of her oldest friend will only warp and refocus, and turn out to be nothing more than a misleading mirage.

Squeezing her eyes shut to expedite the process, she counts to three and peels them back open.

It doesn’t work.

He’s still there.

By the time he dismounts, she’s standing in the open doorway.

“Jake…?”

She reaches out to him, touching his arm to confirm that he’s tangible, that he’s real, that he’s here.

“You came…”