PART SEVEN THE FEED
Devin Crowe was at his computer when it happened.
He was not doing anything in particular.
He had a new Maren open in a tab. He was scrolling a mark’s messages, a man in Phoenix this time, setting up the slow work.
He had Maren Delgado’s Facebook open in another window, the way he always did, the way he checked the weather.
He refreshed the feed.
The post was at the top. It was from Gabe Delgado. It was short. It said: please pray for my wife. She was cruelly shot last night in front of our home. She is in critical condition. They don’t know if she will make it through the night. We have two babies who need their mother. Please!
Devin read it twice. He read it a third time.
The room tilted. He had known Maren Whitfield since he was fifteen.
He had loved her in his strange broken way for seven years.
He had never spoken to her. He had stolen her face and her life and pasted it onto a hundred strangers.
And now she was on the ground in her own driveway with two holes in her back, and he could not understand how the world had done this to her.
He put his head in his hands. He did not cry. He sat. He felt sick in a way he had never let himself feel, because feeling it meant admitting that she was a person, that her photos were a person’s photos, that the lives he had been breaking for three years were real.
Then there was a knock at the door.
He froze. His eyes went to the clock. It was after midnight. He was not expecting anyone. His stomach, already on the floor, dropped through it.
He said: who is it?
A voice on the other side said: it’s me. I was here a few weeks back. Asking for your roommate. I just need to verify a few things. It’s important.
Devin’s mouth went dry. He thought: not now. He thought: I can’t deal with this now. He thought: she’s dying and this person is at my door and I can’t.
But the voice was calm. And Devin needed, more than anything, to say it out loud to another human being.
That the woman he had loved from a distance was dying.
That something terrible had happened. That he felt, for the first time in years, like a person with a heart, and the heart was being crushed.
He opened the door.