Chapter 10 #3
“Yes.” I pull back enough to look at him. His face in the kitchen light—the man who parks two blocks away, who shows up before he’s called, who read a file with me for four hours without once trying to manage what it was going to cost me. “Luke.”
“Yeah, baby.”
“Thank you for reading it with me.”
“There’s no version of this where I wasn’t in that chair,” he says.
“I know. That’s why I said thank you.”
LUKE
I go out to lock Andi’s car at eleven-fifteen.
Not for any particular reason—just an old habit, the kind that persists in your hands before your mind catches up.
We’ve been working inside with the file for four hours, and her car has been sitting in the driveway, unlocked.
It’s only after you’ve surfaced from something that fully consumed your attention that this kind of detail registers, and the ordinary world rushes back in.
I see it through the window before I open the door.
Something on the driver’s seat. A single envelope, centered with the deliberate care I’ve come to recognize.
I stand at the car door for a moment before reaching for it.
Not from hesitation—from the drilled habit of a man who has processed threats long enough to know that the first few seconds of assessment matter.
The street is empty. The neighborhood is doing its late-night quiet. Nothing moves.
I put on the glove I now keep in my jacket pocket because this is what our life is, and I open the envelope.
Inside is a single index card. On it, a timestamp.
Tonight’s date, the time we arrived home, and the time we went inside.
Written in the same careful hand that wrote a groundbreaking date on the back of a photograph.
Not threatening. Not demanding. Just—recording.
It’s meant to say, I was watching you come home.
I was watching you go in. I know what you spent the evening doing.
I know how absorbed you were. I know what you found in that file, and I was close enough to touch your car while you were reading it.
I stand in the driveway in the dark and let the full weight of that land.
The bedroom photo was taken through the window while we slept.
The gym bag was moved while we were at the legislative committee.
The phone was moved while we were asleep again.
This one is different. We were awake. We were twenty feet away.
There was a light on in the kitchen and voices inside, and we were completely, entirely unaware of him on the other side of the front door.
He’s not escalating the violence. He’s escalating the proximity.
I photograph the card in place. I bag it. I go back inside, lock the front door, and stand in the hallway for a moment, deciding what to do with the next twenty seconds before I go upstairs.
Andi has just read the worst thing she’s ever had to read.
She’s upstairs in our shared room, contemplating what her parents’ deaths imply within Evelyn’s operation.
There’s a part of me that wants to go up there and tell her about the card immediately, because we always agreed—always—she should tell me everything, and I truly meant it then and still do now.
She’s sitting on the edge of the bed, where I left her. She looks up. I sit beside her, and I tell her what I found, the same way I always do—every step, in order, without managing how much of it she can handle.
She listens. When I finish, she’s quiet for a long moment.
“He was out there while we were reading it,” she says.
“Exactly.”
She looks at the window. At the street beyond it, dark and ordinary, the neighborhood sleeping. She’s doing what she always does—mapping it, placing it in relation to everything else, building the picture of where we actually are.
“She knows we have the file now,” Andi says. “Or she suspects. She sent him to tell us that she knows.” She pauses, already ahead of it. “She’s not going to wait for us to be ready. She’s already decided the timeline has changed.”
I think about the false timeline we fed the device three nights ago. The month and a half we gave her. And I think about a man who was standing in our driveway tonight while we were reading Daniel’s file.
He was already positioned before we ran the device play. She didn’t send him tonight because of the conversation in the living room. She sent him tonight because she’d already decided to send him, regardless of what she heard.
Which means the false timeline bought us something—but not as much as we thought.
“Bill,” I say. “First thing tomorrow.”
“Yes,” she says. “And Daniel. We need to move faster.”
She lies down. I turn off the lamp and lie beside her and she finds my hand in the dark the way she always does.
Outside, the street is still empty. The neighborhood is still sleeping.
He’s long gone—these people don’t linger—but the card is in a bag on the kitchen counter, and tomorrow it goes to Bill, and it joins a list of intrusions that started with a device behind a bookcase and has arrived, in the space of a few months, at our driveway on the night we read the worst thing we’ve ever read.
He’s getting closer.
We need to finish this before he decides to stop leaving cards.