She skims her finger around the rim of her glass and it comes away red, some mixture of lipstick and wine. She rubs her thumb and forefinger together absently, and raises the glass to her lips again, swallowing the last sip. It's good wine, expensive, but she hardly tastes it.
Stella Gibson is thinking of other things tonight.
It's past midnight, rain bleeding down the windowpane, blurring the lights so that looking out at the city is like trying to see through tears. He's out there somewhere. She hates herself for being here in this hotel room, warm and dry. Safe.
She, Stella Gibson, is supposed to keep other people, other women, safe. But she has failed. She is failing, even now. He's out there doing God knows what, while she is motionless. Drinking wine on her hotel sofa, for fuck's sake. She fights the urge to hurl her empty glass at the window and watch glass shatter against glass. Instead, she sets it on the coffee table and draws her robe tighter around her shoulders, as though the silk will somehow protect her from her own mistakes.
The manila folder in her briefcase is evidence of her failure, and she makes herself cross to the desk and pull it out. Sitting cross-legged on the white bedspread, she opens the folder and spreads its contents carefully over the duvet, adjusting the photos to escape the glare of the too-bright hotel room lights.
Fiona Gallagher, Alice Monroe, Sarah Kay. The names pound through her head like raindrops on a tin roof, insistent in their repetition. These women, laid out on the bed before her, are dead because the police are not fast enough, not smart enough, not good enough. Because Stella Gibson has not been fast enough, smart enough, good enough. It may as well have been her hands wrapped around their throats as they gasped for their last breaths.
Fiona Gallagher, Alice Monroe, Sarah Kay, Annie Brawley. And how many more?
She leans back against the pillows, always too stiff with starch, and forces her herself to imagine. If she cannot save them, then she will become them, however poor her imitation. She will take their pain and make it her own and maybe then she will learn, as they surely must have in their final moments, how to stop feeling.
She stares at photographs of bruised throats, arms, breasts, and feels the injuries searing into her own skin, the ache settling deep into her own muscles. Closing her eyes, she can feel the strong hands closing around her throat, choking her, silencing her unborn screams. And these hands, they feel so like the others, the rough fingers she can still remember tightening around her wrists, the callused palms that have caressed her cheeks. Cutting off more than screams.
And yet, Stella Gibson's throat is pale and smooth. Stella Gibson's wrists are not stained with reminders of her powerlessness, her arms not black with the proof of pain.
Even as her lips smart with the echoes of unwanted kisses, she is unmarked.
There is something else she keeps in her briefcase, and she stands up now to search for it. It has been so long since she needed it that her hand hesitates for a moment, hovering first over the zippered pocket on the outside of the case before slipping into an inner pocket.
The hairband is another kind of evidence, not of failure but of strength, and she slides it onto her wrist. Once upon a time, she had murmured to Annie Brawley, sliding another hairband onto another wrist. They're fairy tale words.
Snap. Pain blossoms across her wrist, and Stella Gibson remembers how to stop feeling.