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She thinks of it sometimes, when she's not doing anything else important.
In the morning, after tea. In the shadows of her room, before dusk, near twilight, into the night. Almost all the time.
'I miss him,' she tells her reflection in the mirror one day. It comes out of her mouth, almost in afterthought; her mirror self looks back startled at her.
They stare at each other—no, she stares at herself (she is alone now), and only remembers to look down when the water laps at her fingers.
The basin is overflowing; her toes flinch from the wet chill in belated response.
She unplugs the stopper, then walks out of the bathroom to sit on the floor in front of the couch. Softness of any kind still unnerves her and her skin is already hypersensitive to the spongy support of the carpet, let alone the strangely nauseating pliability of the couch. She can get almost seasick from all its glutinous yielding.
But it seems her sensitivity of touch of returning; she searches for any reaction, some reaction- nothing. The dark bruising on her wrists deepens in the half-light- for a moment, she sees like a flash of illumination the pulsing dark red beneath the gaping maroon gashes where the iron had dug too deep but no, he had treated her wounds with careful, agonizing precision afterwards and there are only faint white scars criss-crossing the bruising.
Evey holds her thin wrists up to the light from the bathroom and examines it distantly, a connoisseur regarding a strange and exotic art piece. It's probably a good thing she'd left him so soon after; neither of them knows what she is capable of, now.
'I hate him,' she says, testing the words on her tongue, listening to it hang in the air but it sounds the same, as always: I miss him, I hate him, I'll kill him- no difference in them all but the wording, these three-word clichés.
Soon, it won't be long before—
Evey puts down her arms and turns on the television. She watches till her body can resist no longer and falls asleep without noticing: arms wrapped around her drawn up legs, freshly-shorn head resting against her arms.
The room flickers with the light of the late night news and the footage of the terrorist remaking the country dance in ghost-patterns against her skin, but it is no use: it is one of those moments Evey is not thinking about it; she is dreaming and it is enough.