PART NINE THE TRUTH
Devin looked down the barrel. The black circle of it filled his vision. He could see the rifling.
He said: okay. Okay. Don’t. Please.
He said: it was me.
Caleb said: what was you.
Devin said: all of it. The profile. The texts. The calls. The photos. The accident. All of it was me. I can show you. He turned, slowly, toward the computer. He said: it’s all on there. The accounts. The folders. The messages to you. The messages to everyone. It’s me. It’s been me the whole time.
Caleb did not lower the gun.
Devin said: I use her photos. Maren’s. Maren Delgado.
I went to high school with her. I take her pictures off her Facebook and I put them on the profiles.
I talk to people. Men. Women. Lesbians, sometimes, the ones who won’t ever want me, the ones who are off limits.
Gym guys, hikers, runners, anyone who looked free in a way I didn’t feel.
I make them fall for the photos and then I leave.
I thought it was funny. I thought it was fair. I can’t have it, so why should they.
He stopped. He looked at the gun. He said: I just found out tonight, on her Facebook, that she got shot. Two times. In her driveway. I didn’t know. I just saw the post. I’ve been sick about it all night. She’s the woman I’ve wanted since I was a kid. I never even talked to her.
Caleb sat very still. His eyes moved from Devin to the gun in his own hand.
He remembered the smell from the gun after firing it, and placing it beside him on the passenger seat.
The powder on the barrel, the warm metal, the faint ozone of a recently fired weapon.
It was the smell that would be on his hands for days.
It was the smell of a murder in Albuquerque nearly twenty-four hours ago.
He stared at Devin across the table. And he understood, in a slow and terrible way, that the shooter was sitting right here.
That the shooter was him. That he had driven across a state with a gun he could not afford and pointed it at a woman who had never heard his name and pulled the trigger twice because he could not tell the difference between the person who had hurt him and the person whose face had been used to hurt him.
And then came the worse realization.
The voice. The phone calls. The four nights he had fallen asleep to a voice memo.
Low and warm and soft. Not high. Not squeaky.
A voice that had praised him for hours. That had asked how his day was.
That had said it loved him and meant it in the way that a lie can mean a thing, which is to say it meant it enough to sound real.
That voice was sitting across the table from him.
He watched Devin. He listened. Devin was pleading, talking fast, the pitch of his voice climbing in fear.
And Caleb heard it. Underneath the fear, underneath the climbing pitch, there it was.
The voice he had fallen in love with. Raised up an octave or two, thinned out with panic, but the same voice.
The same cadence. The same way of drawing out the end of a sentence.
The only person Caleb had ever loved was sitting across a small table from him, looking down the barrel of a 9mm that Caleb was holding.