At the bite mark.
The flat, wide, completely-occupied, brown-eyed stop of a girl who had been looking at her mother's body with the specific, cataloguing, is-she-hurt quality of a daughter doing a post-reunion damage assessment and had found something she was categorizing.
She breathed.
"Mother," she said. The flat, careful, present, I-am-going-to-ask quality of her voice.
The mother looked at her.
"Were you—" The daughter stopped. She looked at the marks. At the wrists. At the bite. At the specific, comprehensive, full-body evidence of a morning that had involved multiple categories of contact. "Were you raped?"
The flat, direct, no-other-word-available delivery of a girl who had looked at the evidence and had arrived at the only conclusion the evidence seemed to support.
She had seen slave traders work.
She knew what slave trader inventory looked like.
She knew what the marks looked like.
The mother looked at her daughter.
She looked at the marks on her own wrists.
