Chapter 16
Night Five
Julian
Julian checked his phone again. No one had texted him all evening.
Not to check in, not to play Sudoku. He didn’t want to read too much into it, but he worried something had gone wrong.
Mostly, he worried about Betty. From a distant corner in his apartment, Felix meowed.
Julian had given up on finding him tonight.
He slunk to his bathroom, and a pain, a sharp bubble, rose up in his chest. He froze, worrying it would escalate and maybe he would drop dead right there on the tiles with graying grout, but he took five deep breaths and slowly, the pain ebbed out of him.
Probably gas. He shook his head, reached for the Tums in his medicine cabinet.
He needed to call his doctors. He should tell them that he was having recurring symptoms, that it had been four years since the heart attack and maybe it was time to fine-tune his valves again.
He made a mental note to take care of this in the morning.
He wouldn’t do it, he knew, but he was very good at pretending.
Julian peed, washed his hands and examined his face in the mirror. He didn’t think he looked too bad for sixty, for a man whose job had caused enough stress to induce his first heart attack, for a widower who hadn’t relieved himself from his grief for a decade.
He made his way to his office, sat in the chair that had the back that squeaked and had done so since he bought it.
There was a lot you could learn to live with.
He opened his filing cabinet, pulled out his old cases.
Maybe there was nothing to solve here, he told himself.
Maybe he needed to just let it go. Run a candy store.
Look after his heart. Build a relationship with his daughter.
He massaged his temples, eased back. Squeak squeak.
But also, maybe all of that was wrong. If he’d missed something, maybe there was something left to be done.