Page 105 of Wrong Mail

What the hell?

For a second I don't understand what I'm seeing. Then I see who sent it.

Julia.

The garage goes still around me.

I type back, my thumb missing the letters twice.

Julia? Where are you?

Nothing comes.

I try again.

Where are you?

The message sits there, delivered and unanswered, and something in me breaks open so fast I can barely breathe around it. I don't think. I hit call.

The call goes through.

And somewhere off in the dark of the house, thin and terrible, a phone starts to ring in the west hall.

I’m through the utility door before I have decided to move. In the hall, the ringing goes on, coming from the far end.

Luna won’t follow me. She stops at the mouth of the hall and stands there. I shine the light down the hall. No one is there.

Against my better judgement, I press on.

The hall ends in the plastic, stretched from floor to ceiling and taped at the edges. It looks a dirty yellow in the light. The contractors haven't touched it in months. Fine plaster dust still coats the boards from the last day they worked.

The ringing stops.

And then I see the light that isn't mine.

It's low, near the floor, at the seam where the plastic meets the wall. A small rectangle of cold blue, dimming even as I look at it, the screen going back to sleep.

My heart is in my throat before my mind will name it. I kneel and pick it up from the grit. The screen is a spiderweb of cracks under my thumb.

I know whose it is before I turn it over. I know it the second my light catches the pink case, the one with the chip out of the corner she never got fixed.

It's Julia's.

I tap the screen before it can lock. The phone wakes to an open message, unsent, with no name attached because it was never addressed to anyone. Three lines. Half-finished words from someone typing fast in the dark.

in the room. the renovation. I was right about

And there it stops, on about, the cursor still blinking after it.

I put my hand over my mouth. The picture assembles itself without my permission.

She was here.

In this hall.

She got as far as three lines and the word about. Then the phone left her hands.

I think of Rodriguez. The card he left on the island. The marked car idling at my gate today with nobody getting out.