Chương 7
“I file records, remember?”
That earned me a look.
“I hate you again.”
“Good.”
I stood.
“Come with us.”
Rachel stayed seated.
“To your house?”
“Yes.”
“What about my things?”
“Get what you need.”
“What if he gets released before I’m done?”
“We’ll call the nonemergency line and ask what your options are.”
“You sound like a pamphlet.”
“I’m improvising.”
She looked at me for several seconds.
Then she stood.
“Ten minutes.”
“Take twenty.”
“I don’t need twenty.”
“Rachel.”
“What?”
“Shoes.”
She looked down at the thin sandals she had worn to the barbecue.
“Oh.”
“And medication.”
She nodded.
“Charger.”
Another nod.
“Work laptop if you need it.”
“I do.”
“Documents.”
“What documents?”
“Anything you would be furious about losing.”
Her face tightened.
I regretted the phrasing immediately.
“Sorry.”
“No.”
She swallowed.
“That was actually helpful.”
I walked to the SUV and opened Lily’s door.
She looked from me to Rachel.
“Aunt Rachel is coming home with us.”
Lily’s eyes widened.
“For how long?”
“I don’t know.”
Rachel appeared beside me.
“Hopefully not until college.”
Lily gave her a small smile.
“Your cooking isn’t that bad.”
“My cooking is excellent.”
“You burn rice.”
“Rice is difficult.”
“It has instructions.”
Rachel put a hand over her heart.
“Claire, your child has become disrespectful.”
I looked at Lily.
“She’s had a strange day.”
“Fair.”
Rachel turned toward the house.
Then she stopped.
On the porch, beside the front door, sat one of Marcus’s gym bags.
She stared at it as though seeing it for the first time.
“What?” I asked.
“That bag.”
“What about it?”
“He took it to the gym this morning.”
She did not move.
“So?”
“He came home with it.”
“That seems normal.”
“No.”
Rachel’s face had gone still.
“He told me he came straight from Warren’s.”
She walked toward the porch.
I followed.
“Rachel.”
She unzipped the bag.
Inside were wraps, a towel, a half-empty bottle of sports drink, and a black hoodie.
She dug beneath them.
Her hand stopped.
“What is it?”
She pulled out a second phone.
Not Marcus’s regular phone.
A cheap prepaid model with a cracked plastic case.
Rachel stared at it.
“I’ve never seen this before.”
I did not touch it.
“Put it back.”
“Why?”
“Because you don’t know what it is.”
“It’s a phone.”
“You know what I mean.”
She looked at me.
“You think this matters?”
“I think today has already taught us not to guess.”
Rachel turned the device over.
The screen lit when her thumb brushed the side button.
There was no passcode.
A message preview appeared across the top.
DON’T TALK TO CLAIRE ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED OVERSEAS.
Rachel stopped breathing.
Then she slowly raised her eyes to mine.
“What happened overseas?”
I stared at the words until they stopped looking like language and became shapes.
Rachel held the phone between us.
“Claire.”
“Put it back.”
Her eyebrows drew together.
“You keep saying that.”
“Because it isn’t yours.”
“It’s in my husband’s bag on my porch.”
“That still doesn’t make it yours.”
“Neither does his marriage certificate make me blind.”
She looked at the message again.
“What happened overseas?”
Lily was still in the SUV behind us.
That fact mattered more than the phone.
“Not here.”
Rachel laughed once without humor.
“You say that every time something gets real.”
“Your niece is twenty feet away.”
“That didn’t stop Marcus from turning the yard into a fight club.”
I lowered my voice.
“It should stop us from doing the same thing with something we don’t understand.”
Rachel looked toward the car.
Lily was pretending not to watch us.
She had inherited that badly.
Rachel slid the phone back into the bag.
Then she took the whole bag inside.
I followed her through the front door.
The house smelled like grilled onions and the vanilla candle Rachel burned year-round because she said seasonal candles were a scam.
The living room looked perfectly normal.
A throw blanket folded over the couch.
Mail stacked beside a bowl of keys.
A pair of Marcus’s shoes kicked under the coffee table.
Normal rooms can become disturbing very quickly when you start noticing which objects belong to the person you are afraid of.
Rachel carried the bag to the kitchen counter.
“Stay there.”
“I wasn’t planning to run.”
“I mean the bag.”
“I know what you meant.”
She went upstairs.
Cabinet doors opened.
A drawer slammed.
Then another.
I stood in the kitchen and looked at the cheap phone through the partly open zipper.
I did not touch it.
I wanted to.
That bothered me.
Curiosity feels cleaner than fear, but the body knows the difference.
I had spent years keeping my former life separated into labeled boxes in a storage locker and unlabeled boxes in my head.
Now somebody had typed my name into a phone Marcus should not have had.
The wording bothered me most.
Not what Claire did overseas.
Not what happened to Claire.
What happened overseas.
It implied a shared reference.
A conversation already in progress.
Rachel came back down wearing jeans, sneakers, and a sweatshirt over the dress she had worn to the barbecue.
She carried a small suitcase and her work laptop.
“You look like you’re fleeing a country.”
“I packed underwear.”
“That’s generally wise.”
“I also packed the good conditioner.”
“Then we’re in serious territory.”
Her mouth twitched.
She put the suitcase beside the door.
Then she went to a desk drawer and removed a folder.
“What’s that?”
“Mortgage papers.”
“Why?”
“You said documents.”
“I meant identification, insurance, anything difficult to replace.”
“These would be difficult to replace.”
“Not particularly.”
“Claire.”
“Fine.”
She added them to her laptop bag.
The cheap phone buzzed inside Marcus’s gym bag.
Both of us froze.
Rachel looked at me.
I looked at the bag.
It buzzed again.
“Don’t,” I said.
“I’m not.”
A third vibration came.
Then silence.
Rachel took one step toward it.
“Rachel.”
“It could be Warren.”
“So?”
“So what if he knows about it?”
May you like
“What if he doesn’t?”
She stopped.
