3. June #2
A year in, maybe more, a man I had never met sent me a photograph.
It was nothing — that’s the point of it, it was nothing.
Hands around a coffee mug, morning light, no face, because I never allowed faces, mine or theirs.
Underneath it he’d typed: “Seven hours. Asleep, I mean. Proof.” Because I used to ask.
Out of everything men sent me in two years, that’s the one I looked at longest — somebody’s ordinary morning, handed over like a report card.
There was a scar across one knuckle, pale, hooked at the end.
There was a ring beside it, out of focus, heavy, the sort men get for winning something.
There is a ring like that in the case in the front hall. I passed it this week with an armful of towels.
“Milk’s there,” Gus says. “Real milk, oat milk, and something Teddy chose that I believe is marshmallow-based.”
My face gives him nothing. That’s the one skill I kept from the page — two years of being careful taught me how to look calm when I’m not.
I take the mug and thank him. I even drink some, and it tastes like nothing at all.
He’s saying something about the farmers market — whether the kids and I want to come along or stay home watching cartoons.
I hear myself answer in the voice of a competent woman.
Market, sure. List on the fridge. My free hand wipes a stretch of counter that has no crumbs on it.
“I forgot to start the dryer,” I say, and I make myself walk out of the kitchen, not run. Down the hallway. Past the jersey. Navy and green. VAUGHN. 14.
Fourteen.
I close the bathroom door and sit on the floor with my back against the tub. Then I do the math I have been refusing to do for nine days.
The scar. The ring. The number — his number, on a wall I pass ten times a day with other people’s laundry.
FOURTEEN, who paid month after month for over a year and never once asked for any of the things the site sells.
FOURTEEN, who asked whether I’d eaten. Who was awake at all hours.
Who sent one photo, once: his hands, a mug, proof of sleep.
Because a stranger on the internet had been asking after his sleep like it was her business.
Because he was paying monthly for it to be her business.
He handed me that mug thirty seconds ago. Same hands.
I used to wonder what a man like that was getting for his money.
Now I’ve watched him eat dinner with his kids for nine days, watched him be warm on command for a whole city, and I know exactly what he was getting.
An hour a night of being nobody. I was the only person he wasn’t Augustus Vaughn to, and he was paying me for it.
I closed the account without saying goodbye.
I want to check. That’s the terrible joke of it — there is nothing left to check.
Two years of him, every message, every goodnight, and I deleted all of it myself while the kettle boiled.
The only proof either of us ever existed is a scar I could pick out of a lineup, and a photograph that lives nowhere now except in my head.
And eleven days ago, the page came back from the dead for eleven hours, and Velvet sent a note to every old subscriber: JUNO is back.
He was an old subscriber. For nine days I’ve been living down the hall from the one phone that might be holding that notification, and I can’t ask him about it. I will never be able to ask.
The towel hanging off the tub is already folded. I fold it again anyway.
My phone is in my pocket. Bex would pick up on the second ring.
She’s the one person alive who has both halves of me, and she would say the right things in the wrong order until I laughed.
I don’t call. If I tell her, it becomes real, and then she has to live with it too, every time she sees a Cascades logo on a bus. This one stays mine.
Here is what he knows: his nanny is named June, she’s good with his kids, she fixes stuck windows with candle stubs.
Here is what he doesn’t know: the woman he handed a mug to this morning is the reason he knows what a mug photograph looks like.
He never saw my face. He never had a name.
I checked every frame twice for two years and the mask did its job.
It’s still doing it, except now the mask is my face.
If I quit, the agency asks why. Deanna asks why.
Teddy — nine days, and Teddy already saves me the seat facing the back window, because that’s where the raccoons cross the fence at dusk.
Teddy learns that grown-ups warm you up and then go, which is the one lesson this house has already taught him once.
Margot gets handed candidate number five and files it under proof.
And I go back to the studio in Greenwood and start over. Again. Third time this year.
Quitting nine days in needs a reason you can give an agency. Mine is: your client once paid a subscription to talk to me about whether I was sleeping. He doesn’t know. God willing, he never will.
I am not deciding anything on a bathroom floor. I stand up, run the tap, dry my hands on the towel and ruin the fold.
In the kitchen, Teddy has surfaced in dinosaur pajamas and is negotiating for the marshmallow milk. Gus is saying no with the milk already in his hand, pouring, which is roughly how every negotiation in this house ends. He looks up when I come in. “Dryer okay?”
“The dryer’s on.” It’s even true. I started it on the way back, because the lie works better with the thumping behind it.
Teddy pats the stool beside him without looking up from the cereal box. Saved seat. Nine days, and I have a saved seat.
He lifts his mug at me, a little toast, welcome to Saturday. The scar catches the light exactly the way it did in the photograph, and he has no idea. That’s the whole thing. That’s the size of it.
He paid me for two years. He has no idea who I am. And I am going to have to live in his house and pretend I don’t know.