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She sends the order in the app and throws her phone aside, still ignoring the texts.
She closes the excel sheet she worked in to balance the club’s accounts and goes online instead. Signing up was simple enough, but when it comes to picking the blog name, she stops. She looks downstairs, where a man in a brown uniform crosses the floor with a stack of packages under his arm, her mind deep in concentration.
“It’s at home.”
Her head is still turned toward the window when she hears Lydia’s voice. Then, in the mirror she sees Nayomi walk toward her desk.
“Where?”
“In my room, on the vanity.”
“Can you get it?”
Avryl feels a task coming on when Lydia says ‘no’ and tries to look busy.
“Av—”
Just then, her phone pings. “Sorry, sis. Gotta get your drinks!”
An hour after she’s back from getting the coffee, Nayomi’s seat is still empty. So Yasmin comes back to the office a third time.
“Where is this girl?” she asks, pointing at the empty desk.
“I dunno; text her,” Avryl says. She tried “Avryl’s Place”, “Mavryl”, and “Going Avryl” for the blog but changed her mind each time. Avryl’s Planet? She wonders, but scratches that option off her list. It’s another half an hour before she looks up and notices the seat is still empty. She sends a text and watches her phone. Nayomi has a sixth sense when it comes to messages. No one responds faster, but ten more minutes pass and still, no answer.
This is weird.
She shoots off a quick text to her sisters to let them know she’s going to the loft and leaves. The live basically across the street from the club. All she has to do to get there is exit the back of the building, walk through the alleyway out onto Elizabeth Street, and walk south. The trek takes three minutes, four tops. Plenty of time for Avryl to think about all the ways she lives for her sisters. Lydia is the one who found the loft. And it’s great, but they assumed Avryl would move in with them. Sure, she wanted to live with her sisters, but did she want to live with them like this? Basically, as their live-in assistant?
Theyloved living within a couple blocks of the club, but getting in the elevator, Avryl realizes her whole life is contained within two blocks of a city with more than eight million people. Eight. Million. And her life is four people. Five if you count Mia, who she doesn’t speak to often. Six counting Axton.
She unlocks the loft door and steps in. The space is quiet.
Nayomi could be somewhere inside, but Avryl takes a moment to herself to sigh.
“Mimi?” she calls inside. No answer. Where the fuck is she?
“What the hell are these?”
Avryl jumps as she passes her bedroom, the door slightly open. Inside, Nayomi sits in the middle of her bed with legs crossed over and paper and envelopes surrounding her.
The letters.
Words about what happened. The things covered up; the things Axton admitted to doing.
Avryl can’t say anything. Instead, her mouth hangs open in the air as realization assaults her, one rampant thought after the other.
Axton writing about the man he murdered.
The things he said about her dreams, about her sisters.
Saying he would do it again.
He would do it again. He wrote that he would have killed Nayomi’s husband a second time.
“You’re writing… That… Felon? That murderer? That… Piece of…” She stumbles around and stops. “You are pen pals with the man who killed my husband?”
Avryl is still frozen in place, trying to put the realizations aside and find something to say, anything. Still, her feet slowly cement themselves to the floor, and her nails dig little graves for themselves in her hand. Her throat is as dry as those papers, and she’s not sure she could get any words out even if she did know what she was going to say.
