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The rain started ten minutes into the drive and never got serious about it. Fine mist, wipers on intermittent, the center line coming up yellow out of the black.
Yesterday my grandmother had known me for most of an hour. She’d asked about the weather and about my mother numerous times, and I’d answered every time like it was the first, because that’s the job. Sundays are the job. Six years of them.
My apartment was one room over a dry cleaner on a two-lane street, up a set of open metal stairs that sang under my weight. I didn’t turn on the overhead. I never did. The pull-chain lamp on the desk was enough.
The log was still at the clinic, on the shelf below the front counter where it lives, because taking it out of the building would be its own violation and I wasn’t going to hand them a second one. The recut key was still in the drawer at the front desk where Tessa found it.
What I’d brought home was the number. Morning count, seven. Evening count, blank. The gap in between was the size of one vial and one decision I’d made with my hands about four seconds before my brain got a vote.
You don’t need the page for that.
The card went on the nightstand, face up.
I counted it out against my thumb the way I count anything. One, the inventory. Two, the license. Three, the felony under the license. Four, Maple Grove at thirty-two hundred a month. Five, four hundred dollars of savings and a car that needs tires.
The count was right. The math was terrible.
I picked up my phone. Put it down. Picked it up.
His number had been in there since the first night. I’d put it in my phone and never once used it, the way you put a thing in a drawer you might need later.
He answered on the fourth ring. “Patch.”
Not a question. Just his name, in order, the way he says everything.
And I found I had nothing prepared.
“What exactly do you think is going to happen to me?”
It came out steadier than it had any business coming out. Almost all the way steady. The last word caught, just slightly, a hairline thing I’d have bet money nobody could hear.
He heard it. I knew he heard it because of what he did next, which was nothing. He didn’t fill it. Didn’t reassure me, didn’t start listing what the club could do, didn’t tell me it was going to be fine. He just stayed on the line and let me be the one who’d asked.
The rain ticked on the roof. The refrigerator kicked on. The pull-chain swung in a draft from the window, back and forth, throwing the lamplight around.
“Maren,” he said finally.
“I’m here.”
“Nothing’s going to happen to you tonight.”
“That’s a very specific amount of comfort.”
“It’s the amount I’ve got,” he said. “You want the rest of it or you want me to lie?”
“The rest of it.”
So he gave me the rest of it, and it took eleven minutes, and not one sentence of it was reassuring. I slept better than I had in days.
Chapter Seven
Patch
The drain had been in a while and Freak had stopped being careful with it. Dread had called in from wherever he was, gotten four sentences into the drain instructions, lost signal, and not called back.
Freak wrote down what he caught. Freak’s handwriting was worse than Dread’s, which I hadn’t thought possible, and what he handed me looked like a grocery list somebody had been shot during.
Nobody on that compound could make sense of it. Fox looked at it. Brazil looked at it. I looked at it for longer than I’ll admit to.
