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Behind us, the front door opens. I turn to look as a young couple walks in, a chill from outside following them in as the door drifts lazily closed, a rush of wind carrying a small stack of napkins from a nearby table to the ground.
I see the napkins fall before something outside catches my attention and I look, gazing out into the darkened night. The deli is well lit; from inside, it’s hard to see outside where it’s dark. My eyes run over the glass, searching. I almost don’t see him at first. My gaze goes right past him and if not for the reflection of light that catches his eye, I’d miss him altogether, but my eyes double back, and the longer I stare, a face begins to form, the features coming into focus, his body something like a vignette, faded and with indefinite edges.
My breath quickens. I say to Sienna, trying to keep my voice smooth, “I’ll be right back.”
“Where are you going?” she asks, not looking up from her phone.
“I think I see someone outside that I know. Just stay here, okay? Wait for our food. I’ll be back.” All I can think about in this moment is keeping Sienna safe. It’s not her he wants. It’s me.
Sienna’s eyes rise up over the phone and go to the glass. She squints, as if trying to see through something opaque like a glass of milk. “Where?” she asks, not seeing him because he’s stepped further back from the window.
“Just stay here.”
I walk to the door. I pull it open, stepping outside into the cold night. At the same time, he turns and drifts someplace more dark and sequestered—an alley just beyond the deli—looking back so that I’ll follow and I do because I worry that if I don’t, something might happen to Sienna.
I come to the alley laden with back entryways and service delivery bays, a network of black metal fire escapes that are harder to see in the near dark of night. I turn and enter, the street, with its lights, people and traffic, fading away.
Milo Finch comes to a stop about ten feet into the alleyway.
“What do you want from me?” I ask, keeping my distance, wrapping my arms around myself.
“You can relax,” he says. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
“How do I know that?”
“If I wanted to hurt you, I’d have done it by now. It’s not like I haven’t had the chance.”
I don’t know that this makes me feel any better. I don’t know if I believe him either. He knows my name. He read it on my name tag at work. He saw me working at the hospital and, if he wanted to, he could have hung around after and followed me home from a shift. He might know where I live. For all I know, he followed Sienna and me to the deli tonight.
“The police are looking for you. They think you’re the one who pushed Caitlin Beckett off the bridge.”
“And why would they think that?”
I skirt around the truth. “They know you’ve been following her. If you do anything to me,” I say, “they’ll know it was you.”
He harrumphs, looking at the street behind me. “I’m not scared. To be honest, I wish it was me who pushed her off the bridge. Though, if it had been,” he says, bringing his eyes back, “I would have made sure she was dead before I left.” His words are so cold, they take my breath away. “If there is any justice in the world, she won’t survive this. That woman took everything from me.”
“What do you mean?”
He looks away again and I don’t think he’s going to say. He’s quiet, contemplative. He stands inches taller than me, looking down, and I become aware of not only the hatred in his eye, but something more like sadness or grief.
“She worked for me a long time ago. I used to own a restaurant in California. For over ten years, I worked hard, building it from the ground up. It was my passion, my life’s work, and she was a waitress I hired, that I took a chance on because she didn’t have experience working as a waitress, but she seemed eager and proved at first to be a quick learner. Worst decision I ever made.”
“What happened?”
“She worked for me for only a couple months before I fired her. I had to. She gave me no choice. I caught her stealing from me, voiding orders so she could take the cash. She was lucky I only fired her, because I could have called the police and pressed charges. Any normal person would have just moved on and gotten another job. Instead she held a grudge. She wanted to get back at me and she did.” He takes a long, slow breath before exhaling, and I wait, holding my own breath, for him to go on, and in time he does. “Late one night, she broke into my home. My wife and son were out of town for the night. I’d left a window on the first floor open, which I sometimes did for the cross breeze and because I didn’t think about someone breaking in while I was asleep. My mistake. My bedroom was on the second floor. I slept with the door closed, not that it would have mattered because I’m a deep sleeper.” In my mind, I picture this, a woman removing the screen from outside, sliding the window open and crawling through in the darkness of night. “She downloaded stuff onto my computer while I was asleep.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Really sick stuff. Obscene. Pictures of little girls,” he says and my stomach sours, feeling sick. Child pornography. I might not believe him, I might think he was making this up, if I hadn’t already gleaned certain things about Caitlin Beckett myself, like how she will lie and hurt people to get what she wants. “She sent those images from my email to people I knew, and then left out the window, back the way she came. I slept right through it. The police came the next day, before I was even out of bed, because someone I knew, a friend, had called. They searched my house. They took my computer. They found what they were looking for and no one believed me when I said it wasn’t mine. Why would they? I wouldn’t have believed me either. The evidence was there.”
My throat is tight. Child pornography is a very serious crime. You don’t just get a slap on the wrist. It’s life changing.
“That woman is merciless,” he says. “I spent five years of my life behind bars. I’m a registered sex offender now, which means I can’t step foot in a park and every time I try and find a job, they run a background check. The best I can get is as a general laborer when I have a master’s degree in culinary arts. My life is over. That woman ruined it, and what’s worse is that my wife took our son and left because she believed I had those things on my computer. I lost my family, my business, my reputation, everything. My son is eight now. My wife won’t let me see him because I’m unfit to be a parent, or so they say. I haven’t seen him since he was three.”
I press a hand to my mouth, shaking my head, my heart aching for him. I think how, when Sienna was three, she was just learning how to use the potty all by herself. She couldn’t get herself fully dressed or tie her shoes, but by the time she was eight, she was in third grade, reading chapter books and she knew how to ride a bike and to swim. Between the ages of three and eight there are hundreds of milestones. First day of preschool, first day of kindergarten, first lost tooth. He missed them all.
“When I got out of jail, I went looking for her,” he goes on, holding nothing back. “She thought she could get away with it and, for a while, she did. But I found her living out near L.A. in Alamitos Beach and then as soon as I did, she took off. I didn’t give up looking for her.”
