Free Stolen by Daniel Palmer

wireless video sender to transmit the signal from the cable box to the TV I had brought over from our old apartment—our old home, which we both missed so terribly. Even though at the moment we were both doing something perfectly normal, what we weren’t doing was relaxing.
    Ruby made a frustrated noise. “I think I’ve read the same page for the third time,” she said.
    “What’s got you so riveted to that page?” I asked.
    Ruby sighed and said, “I’m serious. I can’t study, John. I can’t concentrate on anything at all.”
    I turned over onto my side and eased the book from her hand. It dropped to the bed with a muted thump.
    “What’s going on?” I asked.
    “What’s going on?” Ruby laughed because it should have been obvious to me. “I think I have to drop out of school, that’s what.”
    “But your professors promised they’d give you extra time on your assignments. Nobody wants you to drop out.”
    “They can give me all the time in the world. My heart isn’t in this anymore. Besides, what good is alternative medicine,” Ruby said, patting the textbook, “if I can’t use it to make me better? I don’t need herbs and needles. What I need is this stupid, superexpensive drug that makes me feel like absolute shit.”
    Ruby flipped over onto her side, hiding her face from me, but I could tell by the way her shoulders heaved up and down that the tears were flowing. I ran my fingers through her hair like a comb and then traced the contours of her slender neck with the palm of my hand. Ruby pressed her body up against mine, her way of saying she needed my touch.
    The softness of her silk pajamas blanketed me in a familiar comfort. I rubbed her back, keenly aware of how her weight loss continued to reveal more and more of her bones. The longer I rubbed, the more she sank into me, until our bodies melded together. With each breath she took in, I did the same, and eventually her tears stopped altogether.
    Ruby turned to face me. Her fragile, vulnerable expression put a walnut-sized lump in my throat. I wanted to fix this. Fix it now. What I’d done instead was add to her misery by compounding it with guilt. I knew why she couldn’t concentrate. Her school subjects weren’t the problem. The issue was what I had done.
    “Tell me what you need,” I said, stroking her hair. “Tell me and I’ll do it.”
    “I just want to go home,” Ruby said, her voice drenched in misery. “I miss our life, John. I miss it so much. This just isn’t fair.”
    “It isn’t forever.”
    “No, it just feels that way.”
    Ginger stretched and yawned to make her presence known.
    “Hi ya, sweet pea,” Ruby said, scratching Ginger’s furry little head. If Ruby had her druthers, she’d adopt again. Her heart was wide open that way, and her love for animals, especially those unwanted and abandoned, seemed boundless. And that love didn’t apply solely to four-legged critters. Winnie Dawes could have decided to abandon ship, literally, to come stay with us awhile, and Ruby would have welcomed her without any lingering animosity.
    Winnie had called a few times to, in her words, “check in,” but I wasn’t expecting to turn the futon into a guest bed anytime soon. Sadly, Winnie would have no idea we were living here under false pretenses. She’d never once visited us in our Somerville apartment.
    “What would happen if we got caught?” Ruby asked.
    “We’d be arrested, that’s what.”
    “I’ve never done anything illegal in my life.”
    “You’ve gotten high.”
    “I didn’t inhale.”
    “Liar.”
    “Okay, besides that.”
    “How about speeding?”
    “I’d say what we’re doing is a heck of a lot worse.”
    “What would you prefer? Give up?”
    “No, I’d have preferred that we didn’t buy the cheap health insurance from Atrium.”
    “Me, too,” I said. “Believe me, if I could take it back, I would.”
    “It’s bad karma what we’re doing, and you know that’s true.”
    “I don’t