I press send on my text to Tegan as I move toward the sound of knocking at the front door, and like so many other things I’ve come across this morning, it could be nothing; it could be totally innocuous. An inconveniently timed delivery or a sales pitch for faster internet service.
But I don’t really know if I’m reallyinthis morning. Instead my brain is a hot stew of a Sunday night when I was twelve years old and a Saturday afternoon when I was twenty-one. My head is full of the steam it lets off.
Tegan left, too, that steam whispers, even as I unlock the door.Everything you did, all the attention you paid. You missed it happening again.
I know deep down that whatever is waiting for me on the other side of the door will somehow have something to do with that laptop, that backpack, that open suitcase on the bed.
I just don’t expect it to be a giant.
I gape at the man who seems to take up the entirety of my front porch, my stewy brain slow to process the sheer size of him, broad and muscular. Maybe that’s why I take in his face, first: sandy-blond-stubbled and unsmiling, his jaw sharp-edged and his brow lowered in confusion. His green eyes narrow as they take me in.
He has to be at least six-five. He looks like he throws truck tires for recreation. Like maybe he throws the trucks themselves. I have never seen a man this built in real life.
But his voice is unexpectedly high-pitched.
“Hi! We’re looking for Jess Greene?”
“What?” I say, blinking at him.
That’s when I realize his voice is not, in fact, high-pitched. Or at least I don’t know if it is, because he has not actually spoken.
He’s not alone.
Beside him—I could be forgiven for missing her—is a middle-aged woman whose head barely reaches the top of the giant’s elbow. She has a mass of silver-brown curls and she is wearing black-framed glasses that are competing for size with her companion’s massive biceps.
I cannot imagine—head full of steam or not—what these two people have to do with Tegan.
Or wait. With me.
I’m the one narrowing my eyes now, at the woman in the glasses.
“Who’s asking?”
The giant shifts on his feet. The woman smiles. My phone pings in my hand.
Tegan, I think immediately, and look down at it. But it’s only Ellie again.Okay, sorry!!!she’s typed, and I recognize it’s unfair, but I’m so irritated that she’s gotten my hopes up for a reply from my sister that my fingers tighten around the phone in frustration.
I think the woman has started to answer, but I cut her off.
“Look, this isn’t a good time. For . . . whatever.” I gesture vaguely at them with my frustration phone-fist. I don’t even remember when or where I set down the shears, but I don’t have them anymore.
The giant’s brow-furrow gets deeper, but the woman is undeterred.
“Well, we have an appointment.”
“Not with me, you don’t.”
“Right. We have an appointment with Jess Greene.”
That steam in my head—it’s spread everywhere now, and I look down, trying desperately to ground myself. The woman’s still talking, but I can’t hear her. If I could only calm down enough to think straight, or if Tegan would just reply. If there was some sort of explanation for some appointment I don’t remember making, if—
“. . . Broadside Media, and we’ve been working with—”
“Wait,” I say, something about what the woman has said finally getting through this haze of confusion and fear.
It’s something familiar.
Not justwhatshe’s said, buthowshe’s said it. Her voice.
