Page 62 of Wrong Mail

I don't dwell on why the person who makes a room full of people bearable to me is also the one my husband can't stand. Or revisit why my best friend made me promise not to be alone with him. It just seemed the neighborly thing to do.

Then he straightens the maps, squaring their edges, and says, "By the way. The intruder from your break-in. The one who went down the steps." A pause. "He died. Last night."

"How do you know that?"

“It was on the news this morning.” He watches my face. “I thought you'd have heard.”

I hadn't. It sits wrong in me now, that a man came into my house and died and I heard it first from a neighbor.

My mind spins.

Last night?

I stand at the island and make the connection I don't want to make. Last night was the night of the green dot. Last night David told me he was fetching things for the party and drove into the city instead.

He stayed at the hospital and didn't answer his phone. And somewhere in that same building, on the same night, the man who came into our house stopped breathing.

I turn away so Henry won't see my face. I run the tap and fill a glass I don't want. I say none of it out loud. David is my husband, and whatever this is, it's between me and him. Not for the ears of a neighbor.

"It's a hard thing to hear," Henry says quietly. "Even about a man like that. It doesn't sit easy on anyone." He lets that sit for a moment. "But it didn't start with you, Mallory. Whatever put him on that road was running long before he reached your door."

For the first time since the break-in, the guilt shifts a little.

He leaves the maps where they are. “Go over them when you get a chance,” he says at the door. “You’ll see more when you stop looking so hard. See you later.”

Then he's gone, up the side of the house and out through the gate.

My phone doesn't make a sound to mark him leaving.

I check my phone. Notifications are on.

And yet there is no alert.

For a moment I think about calling Henry back and asking why. Instead, I tell myself I'll deal with it later.

I should take my pills, lie down, do what I'm supposed to do.

Instead I open the laptop to check the news.

The death is there, the way he said. Four lines on a local site under a photograph of my road taped off five days ago.

A man injured in a Hunts Point home invasion has died of his injuries. Police are still seeking a second man in connection with the break-in.

And below it, because the internet keeps everything, the older article from the week it happened.

They’d released his face. Of course they had. The second man was still out there. I remember Rodriguez sitting across from me at the kitchen island, swiping to that face on his tablet and telling me where the two of them came from. Downtown. Pioneer Square, the missions and the rough blocks around it. They’d been breaking into places together for years. Rodriguez thought the one who ran would disappear into the same part of the city they both knew.

And suddenly I know what I have to do.

The man in the ICU is dead. The only person left alive who knows why two strangers walked up a private road in a storm is the one who got away. He knows why they came to my door and not to the bigger houses on either side.

I don't decide to go. By the time the thought catches up, I'm already pulling on a hooded rain jacket, even though it's the hottest week of the summer. I can't walk into that part of the city looking like Hunts Point money. I save the man's face to my phone and order a car.

Then I think of David.

I glance down at the app on my phone. He'll see me cross the bridge. I could turn it off, but that would only give him something else to question. Seattle I can explain if I have to.

There is no version of this where I'm not seen.