Chapter 3 - The Note
I caught him in the parking lot outside Halloway Freight at ten minutes to nine the next morning.
"What did they say to you?" I asked, no preamble at all.
He actually looked around — genuinely scanned an empty parking lot at ten to nine on a Saturday morning — and then walked me around the side of the building, away from the doors, out of sight of anything.
"Look," he said. "I don't know how to tell you this."
"Just tell me, Roan."
He swallowed hard, reached into his jacket pocket, and handed me a folded piece of paper that my sixteen-year-old daughter had slid under his plate at some point during dinner without either of us noticing.
It was a single page torn out of a school exercise book, folded into quarters.
On one side was a photograph, printed out on our own home printer, slightly streaked with faded toner. It was a screenshot of a text message thread. The number at the top wasn't saved under any name.
The message itself was two lines of text, plus one image.
The image showed a front door. A blue front door, with a black number 14 mounted beside it, and a wheelie bin sitting off to the left, photographed from across the street at night.
Underneath it, the text read:
Nice place. She's mine. Ask her about August 2019.
Below the printout, in my daughter's handwriting — the exact same handwriting I have taped to my refrigerator, scrawled across every birthday card she's ever given me, written on a card she once brought to a hospital bed in 2016 — she'd written:
That was sent to Casimir at 11:40pm on the night he came for dinner. He gave me a copy.
Something just like this will come to you within about a day. I'm sorry.
Please just tell her you're not interested. Don't tell her why. Delete her number and don't answer if she calls.
She doesn't know he can see the calendar. Please don't make it worse. I've been keeping this quiet for two years and it's been working.
May you like
Sorry. — S
I sat down right there on the curb in the parking lot of my own workplace.
