Losing Clara

Chapter Seven: Two Phones

Patrick's apartment sat on the thirty-first floor and looked like nobody lived there. White walls. A couch he had never sat on. A kitchen so clean it echoed.

He stood at the window with Clara's reply still lit in his hand. Two words. He had read them four times, like a man rereading a verdict he didn't quite believe.

On the counter lay a small square of foil, the wrapper from a mint an older woman had pressed into his palm during the offering. She hadn't asked him a single question. He smoothed the wrapper flat with one finger, then set it carefully beside his watch, the way you'd set down something fragile.

The watch had cost more than Clara's tuition.

He looked at it for a long time.

Then the drawer under the microwave buzzed.

It was a low, insect sound, and he knew it before he opened the drawer. Inside lay a second phone, black and scratched and never allowed to leave the apartment. Its screen showed a name that wasn't his and a message that made his stomach turn slowly over.

Margaret E. — 71 — Naperville. Thursday.

Below it was a number, and the number had too many zeros.

Patrick shut his eyes. He could still see her, or the version of her he had built from a voice on a recording: a retired schoolteacher who signed every email with a little sunflower. He had promised himself this one would be the last. He'd made that promise on a rooftop in August, and again in the shower last week, and again this morning while a stranger's mint sat in his pocket like a small, ridiculous piece of grace.

He had made a lot of promises. None of them had ever cost him anything.

His real phone lit up on the counter.

Treasure: Driver says you had coffee with a girl—some girl who wouldn't take the bag.

Patrick crossed the room in three strides.

Treasure: You've been slow for a week. Slow gets people hurt, Pat. Who is she?

The typing dots pulsed, vanished, pulsed again. Patrick's thumbs hovered over the screen. He could feel the whole night narrowing to that one small glass rectangle.

He typed: She's nobody.

The word looked wrong the moment it appeared. It looked like a lie told in the dark to protect something. Which was exactly what it was.

He sent it before he could take it back.

The reply arrived in seconds.

Treasure: Nobody gets a gold-wrapped box and a personal driver.

Then, before Patrick could answer:

Treasure: Thursday's bigger now. Come to Wabash—third level. Bring your head straight.

A pause. The dots again, slower this time, as if the man on the other end was choosing each word.

Treasure: And if she's really nobody, you won't mind me saying hello.

The cold went all the way through him.

He typed Don't and deleted it. He typed Leave her alone and deleted that too, because he knew what Treasure did with anything he could tell mattered to someone. Show a man what you'd lose, and he learns exactly where to press.

Behind him, the second phone buzzed once more in its drawer.

Patrick picked up his keys. He took the mint wrapper from the counter, folded it once, and pushed it deep into his pocket. Then he stopped at the door with his hand on the light switch and looked back at the room, white and spotless and empty.

For the first time in two years, he was afraid of the life he had built.

And for the first time, he wasn't afraid for himself.

He turned off the light.