Chapter Seven #3
He dressed her with the same care he had used to undress her.
The shorts went up her legs first, then the tank top, his fingers guiding the straps back onto her shoulders with a gentleness that would have been tender if it had not been so profoundly invasive.
When he was finished she lay exactly as she had when he entered—on her back in the center of the bed, the sheet pulled to her shoulders, her chestnut hair spread across the pillow.
She had not woken. She had not even stirred.
The dream continued behind her closed eyelids, and whatever it contained, he was not in it.
He left three traces that night. The earring was moved once more—from the dresser surface to the windowsill, where it would catch the morning light and demand her attention the moment she opened the curtains.
A single dark button, cut from the cuff of his own black shirt, was placed inside the left cup of the bra she had set out for morning—a simple white cotton bra with a small bow at the center, the kind she wore to class, unremarkable in every way except that it would now carry a foreign object she could not explain.
And the bathroom mirror received a single clean fingerprint at the exact height of her eyes, placed so that she would have to look directly at it when she stood in front of the glass to wash her face or brush her teeth or perform any of the small morning rituals that constituted the beginning of her day.
He checked the fingerprint before leaving.
It was perfect—a clear oval of whorls and ridges, the kind of print that looked as though someone had leaned close to the mirror to examine their own reflection and pressed a finger against the glass for balance.
It was placed precisely at five feet six inches above the floor, the height at which her own eyes would meet the glass.
She would see it the moment she stepped up to the mirror.
She would wipe it away. And then she would stand there staring at the clean glass, wondering whose finger had left the mark and how it had gotten into her bathroom while she slept.
Allie began noticing on the sixth day. She stood in the bedroom late in the afternoon while Caleb was still at class—or wherever he went when he said he was at class—and turned in a slow circle.
The house was quiet around her, the same quiet that had been pressing against her eardrums for nearly a week now, the kind of quiet that felt like it was paying attention.
She looked at the dresser first, where the earring post was no longer beside the lotion bottle where she had left it.
She found it on the windowsill, balanced upright on its post, catching the pale afternoon light like a tiny silver accusation.
Her fingers closed around it. The metal was cool, and the post felt wrong against her skin in a way she could not articulate.
She had not moved it. She was certain she had not moved it.
She had been putting it in the same place beside the lotion bottle for months, and the only other person in the house was Caleb, and Caleb had never once touched her jewelry in the entire time they had lived together.
She set it back in the ceramic dish where it belonged and stood looking at the dish for a long moment, her thumb rubbing absently against the inside of her wrist.
The bra was in the second drawer of the dresser, exactly where she had left it the night before. She pulled it out without looking—the motion was automatic, muscle memory honed by years of mornings—and when she shook it out to put it on, something small and dark fell into her palm.
A button. A man's shirt button, dark grey or black, made of some matte material that did not reflect the light.
Smooth on one side, slightly concave, with four small holes in the center.
The thread that had once held it to a garment had been cut cleanly, no loose fibers, no sign of tearing.
It was not one of Caleb's. Caleb wore polo shirts and button-downs from brands she recognized, and this button matched none of them.
The finish was too dark, the material too matte, the weight slightly wrong.
She lifted the bra to her face and inhaled.
Her own scent was there—the coconut lotion, the faint trace of the detergent they used—but beneath it was something else.
Something clean and male and unfamiliar.
Not cologne exactly. More like soap. A particular kind of soap that she did not own and Caleb did not use, something that smelled of leather and sandalwood and a sharpness that reminded her of the way the air smelled after a thunderstorm.
She dropped the bra on the bed and opened the drawer wider, then closed it and opened it again.
Nothing else had been disturbed. The other bras were folded exactly as she always folded them.
The socks were rolled. The small box where she kept the necklace her grandmother had given her was in its proper place, the lid closed, the clasp secured.
She was being ridiculous. She was letting the quiet get to her, letting her imagination run away with fragments of evidence that could be explained by a dozen ordinary causes.
The button could have been left by a friend who had used the bathroom.
The scent could have been transferred from the laundry room where the cleaning service sometimes washed their cloths.
She could explain it all. She just could not make herself believe the explanations.
At the bathroom mirror she stopped so abruptly that her hip bumped the edge of the counter.
The fingerprint was still there, pressed into the glass at the exact level of her own eyes.
A clear oval of whorls and ridges, slightly smudged at the edges, as if someone had leaned against the mirror while examining their own reflection.
She stared at it for a full five seconds without moving.
Then she lifted her fist and wiped it away with the side of her hand, watching the ridges dissolve into a faint smear and then into nothing at all.
She stood in front of the clean glass for a long time after that.
Her own reflection stared back at her—green eyes slightly too wide, chestnut hair slightly too tangled, the composed surface of her face showing the first fine cracks that would widen if she kept staring.
She was looking for something she could not name, some visible evidence of the wrongness that had been accumulating in the house like dust in the corners of rooms no one entered.
The reflection gave her nothing. The glass stayed clean.