Before Four A.M.
“The most dangerous moment is not when you decide to leave.
Lisa’s POV
It is the hour before, when everything you are
tries to talk you out of it.”
I did not sleep.
I had not expected to. Sleep required a certain surrender of consciousness that my body had decided, firmly and without negotiation, it was not willing to make tonight. So I lay on the cot in the dark and I breathed—in for four counts, out for four—and I held the key against my sternum like a second heartbeat, and I waited for time to pass.
Time, underground, does not pass the way it does in the open air.
It moves differently. Slower. With a kind of deliberate weight, as though the stone walls have absorbed years of waiting from everyone who came before me and are simply returning the favor. I had no cl
