Under the laptop’s hum, the old clock on the wall ticks, slow and steady. I count. Every fifth second, I think about the body on the rocks. Every tenth, I think about the way the big man put his hand on her arm when she slipped on the ice outside Karla’s. How easy it would be for that gesture to reverse.
Protection and pressure look very similar from far away.
I could use that.
Finally, her answer arrives.
curious isn’t the word i’d use
I tilt my head, considering. There’s a crack in the sentence. A little jag of something more than fear, less than bravado.
No emoji. No nervous laugh. No “lol” to make it look like a joke.
That’s the thing about smart people: when you scrape away the performance, what’s left is very clean. Honest.
I run my thumb along the edge of the laptop, feel the plastic give a little under the pressure.
They’ve crowded her. Jack in his cruiser and the deputies lining her street. The wall posted up in her living room. They think more bodies in the room make her safer.
Sometimes they do.
Sometimes they just make better leverage.
I picture her at that couch, laptop balanced on her knees, knees pulled tight to her chest so she takes up less space.
She thinks she’s deep in a bunker.
She’s not.
She’s under a looking glass.
you picked the wrong word then
She’ll ask which one I’d choose.
She’s predictable that way. Not in a boring sense. In the sense that gravity is predictable. You can do all kinds of tricks while you fall, but gravity is still going to win.
I don’t send anything else. Not yet.
Conversation, like killing, is all about pacing. You don’t dump everything out at once. You leave white space. You let the other person fill it with their own noise, their own fear.
She’s going to tell Jack about this, of course. Show him the messages. She’ll show the wall.
They’ll argue about how much to let me talk. How much to let me see.
They’re already a step behind.
They keep thinking the work starts when I step into the light—when I knock, when I write, when I press my hand to glass.
That’s just the moment they’ve noticed me.
The work started months ago, when I first looked up Lucy Falls again on the map and listened to the way the name sounded in my head. When I checked the school calendar, the local events, the Friendsgiving invitations, the due dates on their babies. When I watched the circle of people around her tighten and loosen, breathe in and out.
When I learned the cadence of her typing.
I’m not improvising.
I’m finishing a story she interrupted.
