My body hadn't gotten that message yet.
My ankle felt strange without the weight of the cuff. It had felt strange since it was removed but I'd been moving and riding and occupied enough during the day that I hadn't had to sit with the strangeness of it. Now lying still in the dark with nothing to do but exist in this room my ankle was the most present part of me, the skin still raw and tender, the absence of the metal that had been there every night for five years registering as something wrong even though it was right.
I kept waiting for the sound of boots in the corridor.
Every time the pack house made a sound, a door somewhere down the hall, the natural settling of a large building in the night, my whole body would go alert in the particular way it had learned to go alert at certain
