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The first time it happened was a month after they left Bly.
Dani felt strange the entire day leading to the full moon, but wasn’t sure what could be causing it. Was she dehydrated? Not enough sleep? Her skin was stretched too thin over her bones, and she was endlessly restless. It wasn’t until that night that they understood.
In a hotel room outside Baltimore, Dani felt her joints pop, jolting her out of a sound sleep. Her fingers elongated, her eyelids sealed shut, and she could no longer speak. She had no control over her body, her mind. She belonged to the Lady now.
Jamie woke with a strong grip around her throat, squeezing. “Dani, please. Dani!”
Slowly, Dani fought with every fiber of her being until she could loosen that grasp, allowing Jamie to get away.
Jamie watched in horror as Dani’s startled features slowly returned. She spent the rest of the night in a chair watching over Dani as she paced the room, terrified the Lady would return. The next morning, all traces of the transformation were gone, but Dani couldn’t stop shaking.
Jamie tried again and again to reassure her. “You didn’t hurt me. You were stronger than her.”
“How long will it be until I can’t stop her? How long? ”
By the second full moon, Dani knew what was coming when she experienced that familiar stretch to her skin. “You need to get out, and we need to figure out a way to stop her from hurting anyone else.”
Jamie ran to the hardware store in town and bought 3 different deadbolts, and every tool she would need to attach them to the hotel room door with zero care toward the company policies. It took her 4 hours to finish, but she was satisfied with the attempt.
When the sun got low, Jamie reached for Dani, kissing her desperately. When Jamie pulled away, Dani cupped the back of her head, pulling their foreheads together.
“I’m going to be in the car all night, watching the room. I won’t let her hurt anyone, d’ya hear me?”
Dani nodded against her, terrified it wouldn’t work. Throughout the night, the Lady circled the room, trying the door over and over. One deadbolt lay on the ground, in pieces. Scored lines from broken fingernails etched the wood. It was then they decided to stop travelling and settle down in one place, where they could find a more permanent solution.
They chose Burlington, and used the money Henry gave them as severance to lease a shop space and the charming apartment above it. Before they began buying any furniture, Jamie went to work on the bedroom door.
Having learned from the previous experience, she knew the more complicated the lock, the better to keep the Lady in place. So, she studied. The longer it went on, the better the Lady seemed to get at learning the locks. Jamie went to night classes at the local community college. Becoming quite the locksmith, she prided herself on filing mechanisms into intricate mazes that not even Dani could figure out how to disable.
“She doesn’t seem to do well with sequentially interlocking components.” Jamie grumbled, while moving several complicated pieces around the table, trying to find the best possible combination.
Dani ran her fingers lovingly through her curls, amazed as always at the lengths Jamie went through to keep her… them … safe.
Once, after a particularly grueling night where the Lady almost escaped her prison, Dani sat at the same table in tears the next morning. “Maybe I should just accept that she’s winning. Maybe I should just go , at least then you’d be safe.”
Jamie crouched at her feet, wiping Dani’s tears from her face with gentle hands. “ No. No. We take this one day at a time, ok?” She took Dani’s hands in hers, kissing her fingers one by one. “Trust me when I say, if I have to make these locks for the rest of my life, I would happily do it, if it meant I would never have to say goodbye to you.”
Dani sobbed, sliding out of her chair onto the floor to embrace this miracle of a woman. They held each other on their knees, swaying slightly. Dani pulled back and looked into her eyes. “Promise me, Jamie. Promise me that if it’s ever too much, you’ll let me go.”
Jamie started shaking her head before Dani could finish her sentence. “Can’t promise you that, Poppins. You’d have to throw me out of that window to get me to stop fighting for you, d’ya hear me?”
Dani nodded, pulling her in close again.
They worked hard to settle into this new life. They planned their vacations around a strict calendar, so they could always be home when they needed to be. They got a more comfortable sleeper sofa, since Jamie had to sleep in it every month, and her back wasn’t quite what it used to be.
They learned to laugh, dream, and make plans for their future. Eventually, after many more successful incidents, Dani learned to stop dreading every waxing moon. The stretch of her skin announcing the Lady’s presence became a familiar annoyance, instead of a sign of doomed fate. Decades passed, and Dani was still here. Dani was still her. And although Dani never thought such a thing would be possible, they did in fact live (mostly) happily ever after.
