Page 115 of Wrong Mail

"What?"

"Your phone, Mallory."

He holds out one hand and drives with the other. I don't move. The corner of his mouth shifts, almost a smile.

"It's all right," he says. "You can show me."

I should say no. I should throw it, hide it, do anything but sit there with the phone burning against my palm. But the moment has gone too thin, and before I can decide what to do with it, Henry reaches over and takes the phone from my hand.

Not roughly. That is somehow worse.

His eyes flick down, then back to the road. Down again. He reads enough. He sets my phone facedown in the console, closer to him than to me. Then he gives a small breath through his nose, not a laugh, but almost one.

"I wondered when you'd get it," he says.

"Get what?"

He cuts me a glance. Something moves at the corner of his mouth.

"That look," he says. "You had it in the bar in Portland. I really hoped you wouldn’t remember.”

The bridge hums under us. The wipers cross and cross. On both sides the black water waits.

He knows me. He knew me in that bar. All this time, at the mailbox, at my table, at the door of my house, he has known exactly who I was before the crash took it out of me.

The rescue. The kindness. The patient hand on my head ten minutes ago. All of it was him wearing the good neighbor over what he is.

“But it was the houses. That’s how you found me the first time, wasn’t it?” he says. “You found the houses. That was the part nobody else got near. Not the bodies. Everyone found the bodies. But you, Mallory. You found what came after.”

He’s not confessing. He’s talking about the case, like two people who once worked the same one and are pleased with the clever thing the other one saw. Except the clever thing is him.

“You know, I looked for you after the crash,” he says. “You were hard to find. When things went quiet in Oregon, I thought you’d run, or been warned off, or lost your nerve. It took me a long time to understand you’d simply stopped being her.”

I don’t ask how he found me again. I don’t have to.

“Before I ever moved into that house, I saw you in a shop. You looked straight at me and kept walking. Another time I bumped into you at a café in Seattle. Made you spill coffee all over me.” He almost smiles. “Nothing.”

My stomach turns.

“So I got closer. Moved in down the street. Put those articles with the packages at your door. Your own work, Mallory. I thought surely that would do it.” He looks through the windshield. “Still nothing.”

The wrong mail. The dinner. The party. The mail I carried up the road and handed back to him like a good neighbor.

Tests.

Every one of them.

“Every time I handed you another thread, I thought that would be the one that brought it back. But it never did.” His voice softens. “I could have left then. The crash had given me everything I needed. You didn’t know me. You didn’t know what you’d found.”

He turns his head slightly.

“But how could I walk away from you?”

He almost smiles. I feel it more than see it.

“And now,” he says, “you remember.”

And under the horror of it, colder than all of it, comes the other thing. The thing David kept saying.