Sybil:Simone! Hi! I’m so glad to hear from you. I’m up!
Simone:right, my dad had mentioned that
Sybil:Are you ok?
Sybil felt a rush of euphoria. It was demented, she realized, how much she wanted to be needed, how badly she needed to be put to use. Simone was grieving, and here Sybil was, using her for a contact high.
Simone:hanging in. been better, you know? anyway, i’m going thru my dad’s things and thought you might want his phone
Sybil:oh ok? You don’t want it?
Sybil had no idea why Simone would want her to have Julian’s phone, but if Simone was asking, then Sybil’s answer would be yes.
Simone:i take it no word from betty?
Sybil:Not yet.
Simone:ok, send me your address, i’ll take an uber
Sybil hadn’t realized Simone had meant she was giving her the phonenow.
Sybil:I have a car! I can come to you!
Forty-five minutes later, at 2:12a.m., Sybil pulled up to Julian’s old apartment building. Pluto had fogged up the windows in the back, and she rolled down a window to air it out for a beat before heading in. It was strange, seeing where her late friend lived, seeing where he had a wholelifebefore he knew her and even during, and now that was all gone. She thought of Betty, of what her old life must have looked like. Unimaginable really. Maybe Zeke was right, maybe Betty did want to get lost. Maybe she had burned down the church, and even if she had killed those people, maybe Betty thought they had it coming. That Sybil could understand, the vengeance of retribution against people who had taken so much from her.
She thought of Mark.
It wasn’t the same, of course, but he’d stripped something from her, too, over the years of their marriage.
She rolled up the window, opened the back seat for Pluto and made her way up Julian’s stoop. The air was blustery, frigid, like if you weren’t careful, you could succumb to the elements quickly. In medical school, Sybil had been fascinated with frostbite, how your limbs just…died…like they weren’t even part of you anymore. No feeling, no blood. Attached but dead all the same.
Julian’s apartment was cozier than she’d expected, a deep couch, a leather chair, a rich and ornamental patterned jewel-toned rug. Pluto immediately started sniffing the perimeter.
“We have a cat,” Simone said. “Or I guess I do now. Felix. He doesn’t mind dogs.”
Sybil unhooked Pluto’s leash and let him roam and took a long look at Simone before making the impulsive decision tohug her. Really really hug her. Like the girl needed a mother now that she didn’t have a father, and Sybil was going to hug her until she felt like she had one.
Simone eventually pulled back. “Thank you.” She had bluish circles under her eyes, her cheekbones so much sharper than just a few weeks back at Thanksgiving. “One second, let me get his phone.”
She wandered into another room right as a cat raced through with Pluto chasing it.
“Here,” Simone said when she returned, placing the phone in Sybil’s palm. “I removed the lock code so you don’t have to worry about that.”
“And you’re sure…I mean, I’m happy to take anything off your hands or help in any way,” Sybil said.Please please let me help in any way!“But you don’t need anything off this? Want anything from it?”
Simone shook her head like Sybil was aggravating her. “No, here.” She took the phone back and punched a few icons on the phone. “I’m tired, I’m sorry, I’m not explaining things right. You need his phone. Because of this.”
She passed it back to Sybil. It took Sybil’s brain a solid three seconds to catch up to what her eyes were seeing.
There was a picture of Betty taken from afar on a subway platform. She was being helped to her feet, having apparently fallen to the ground, by a tallish dark-haired man in a suit. Caleb.
“I don’t…” Sybil said. “What am I looking at?”
“It came into his texts the night of the hit-and-run.”
“The photo?” It was a dumb question, and she regretted asking stupid things of Simone, but she knew her brain was dulled from the lack of sleep.
“Thisphoto.”
