Chapter 2 - A Note Meant for Someone Else's Father
Against the far wall, half hidden behind a wall of stacked storage boxes, sat a second car. Not Marcus's truck. A small red hatchback I'd never laid eyes on — with a child's booster seat buckled into the back seat like it belonged there.
My knees went soft under me. I made myself walk closer anyway, one unsteady step at a time, my phone shaking so hard in my hand I nearly dropped it before I even needed it.
I pressed my face close to the window glass.
Crayon drawings were scattered across the floor mats. A single small sneaker, the toe scuffed pale from wear, was wedged half under the front seat. And tucked into the cup holder, folded into a careful little square, was a piece of paper with a child's handwriting scrawled across the front.
It read: For Daddy.
I couldn't get a full breath in. I called Marcus with fingers that wouldn't stop shaking.
He picked up on the second ring, his voice bright, easy, completely unaware.
"Hey. How's the eye doing — vision still coming along?"
For a second I couldn't make my mouth work.
"Marcus," I said finally. "Whose car is parked in our garage?"
Silence stretched on the line, long enough that I thought the call had dropped.
Then, very quietly, he asked, "What are you doing in the garage?"
Not whose car. Not let me explain. Just that — what are you doing in the garage — like the real emergency wasn't the car at all, it was me standing in front of it.
That was the moment I knew, with total certainty, that whatever this was, it was worse than I'd let myself imagine walking in.
May you like
He had never once pictured me finding this. He had built his whole arrangement around the certainty that I never would.
What he said next made the phone slip clean out of my hand.
