Page 75 of Wrong Mail

"Someone called me. A friend. It was personal."

"Who?"

He rubs at his mouth and winces when his fingers find the split lip.

"Someone from Portland. It’s nothing to do with the patient who died."

"That's not what I asked."

"No," he says quietly. "It isn't. Look, you wouldn't know them. Just someone from the past.”

And there it is. The gap where the truth should be. I could push. But pushing means admitting how I know where he was, and I'm not ready to show him that. Julia's warnings are in me, sitting close. Still, a friend from Portland is only a friend from Portland. I can't make it more than that without showing a card I'm not ready to play.

"But...you told me you were picking up things for the party," I say.

His face goes still. I hadn't meant to say it. Not like that, not yet.

"I was on my way," he says. "Then I got a phone call. They wanted to meet me. The conversation ran on longer than I thought it would."

"So that explains why you never answered your phone. I tried to call you."

He doesn't answer that.

"And now someone says you were there the night that man died, with no reason to be," I say.

He nods again. "With no official reason."

"They think you killed him, don't they?"

"No," he says, too quickly. "They don't think that."

But we both hear the lie in it. The complaint doesn't have to say murder. It only has to point.

I don't say anything more. I sit there with David's hand around mine, and I don't tell him that I watched a green dot cross the water that night and stop at that hospital. I don't say that I've been carrying that fact ever since.

I'm getting better at keeping things from him.

Chapter Twenty-Four

The storm came through in the night and left the world wrung out. I wake to gray dripping light, the bed cold beside me, and water coming off the eaves in long ropes.

I come downstairs still half asleep.

David is gone. There's a note on the kitchen island, written on the back of one of his hospital notepads.

Couldn't sleep. Gone in early to get ahead of Monday. Back by noon. Lock up. D.

No mention of the complaint. He has turned the worst thing in his life into an errand and left it beside the fruit bowl.

I make coffee I hardly touch and stand at the terrace doors, looking out at the lake.

The water lies dull under the low sky. The aviary sits at the edge of the lawn beneath the dripping cedar, but I barely notice it.

I’m thinking about the hospital. About the green dot that sat over it for the better part of three hours. About the man who died in a bed somewhere inside that building. About the complaint that came after.

I’m doing what Henry warned me not to do. I’m taking pieces that don't yet prove anything and arranging them until they start to look like an answer.

So when the knock comes I am almost glad of it.