I couldn't sleep.
Judah was beside me, breathing evenly. I lay on my back staring at the fresco ceiling and thinking about cream cardstock and his handwriting. About numbers circled in the upper right corner.17.Celeste Taylor.
I thought about Gerald Hall.
He'd given me his card when we first met. And had stolen my pen. I thought about that pen. How I wanted it back along with some answers. But that card. He'd pressed it into my hand and said something about Celeste and I'd taken it and — where had I put it? I couldn’t remember whether what I had been wearing had had pockets. Maybe I’d tossed it into the bottom of my bag with everything else that fell through the cracks of my life?
I didn't know where the card was.
I needed to know where the card was.
I tried to sleep.
Judah got up early. We had sex. He came on my stomach.
I heard the shower start and I sat up and reached for my bag on the nightstand.
I went through it methodically. Wallet, keys, the lip balm I kept losing and finding. A receipt from the pharmacy. Another from the grocery. The small notebook I used for volunteer scheduling that had somehow accumulated three dead pens.
No card.
I upended it onto the bed.
Everything came out in a small avalanche — loose change, a hair tie, a button that had come off something and that I'd put in my bag with full intentions of reattaching. Two more receipts. A folded piece of paper that turned out to be Darlene's handwritten directions to the food bank supplier that I'd needed once in my first week and apparently kept for no reason.
No card.
The shower was still running.
I looked at the pile on the bed and then I got up and went to the closet. I went through every single pocket on every single piece of clothing I owned. Empty. Already washed, everything gone.
The small dish of nonsense every respectable girl had — and me among them — used to sit on my old dresser — now it wason the windowsill, catching the bright Louisiana sunlight. It held the same things it always had: a pair of earrings, a broken hair clip, twenty-three cents in pennies.
No card.
I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at my bag's contents spread across the sheet and thought. The shower cut off.
Okay. No card. Which meant either it was lost — genuinely lost, gone through the wash or dropped somewhere between July and now — or it was in my apartment. My old apartment, which was no longer mine, which someone else was probably living in.
So. No card.
I started putting things back in my bag.
He came out of the bathroom in a cloud of steam, towel at his waist, already reaching for his shirt. He glanced at me. At the bag.
“Looking for something?”
“My lip balm,” I said. Found it in the pile. Held it up.
He nodded and went back to dressing.
I thought about it all morning.
Not obsessively — or maybe obsessively, but quietly. I filed the donation receipts. I responded to three emails about the September intake. I made coffee and brought Darlene a cup and sat at my desk and thought about Gerald Hall.
I’d heard talk he was still in town. So if he was in town, still, then there was only one place he could’ve been staying. The Prosperity Inn on Prosperity Street which I had driven past forty times and never stopped at. And which was, I was realizing, the only place I could go without asking anyone for directions or information or anything that could get back to Judah.
I looked at my computer screen.
