Chapter 2 - The Phone Call
I called Russell before I could talk myself out of it. He answered on the fourth ring, already impatient. "What?"
"Do you know someone named Walter?"
The silence lasted a beat too long to be nothing.
"Who talked to you," he said. Not a question. An order.
"No one. I found—"
"Whatever he told you, don't listen to him. He's not stable. He's dangerous," Russell blurted. "Stay away from him, and stay away from whatever he handed you."
"Nobody said he handed me anything," I said.
His voice had gone somewhere I hadn't heard in twenty-one years of marriage — not annoyed. Frightened.
May you like
Russell hung up. I stood in my kitchen holding the phone and understood something for the first time in two years: Russell had never once, in our entire marriage, sounded afraid of a person. Documents rattled him. Deadlines rattled him. People never had.
Until that moment.
