Chapter 4 - The Man by the Shed
I followed him through the kitchen. I don't fully know why. Maybe because whatever was happening, I wanted it happening away from the stairs Delaney would be coming back down.
The backyard was almost completely dark. Just the porch light behind us and the little solar lamp Dean had staked into the ground by his shed.
Nolan started walking toward the far end of the yard.
"What did you do?" I said. "Tell me what you did."
"You'll see it in a second."
"I hate that sentence. I have always hated that sentence."
"Yeah. Figured."
Then I saw someone standing beside the shed.
A man. Just a shape at first, hands in his pockets, not moving.
He stepped forward into the reach of the little lamp.
I screamed.
"DEAN?"
My husband lifted both hands like I was pointing a gun at him. "Hi."
"You are supposed to be four hours away!"
"I was, this morning. I left early and drove straight through."
"And it didn't cross your mind to call me? Text one word?"
He glanced at something on the grass beside him — a big, low shape under a blanket. "That would've ruined it."
Nolan muttered, "I'm going back inside."
"You're not going anywhere," Dean and I said, close enough to together that Nolan actually stopped.
Dean had a look on his face I didn't like at all. Guilty. Caught. On Dean, that expression was rare enough to scare me.
"What did the two of you do?"
Dean nodded toward the covered shape. Under the old moving blanket it was maybe waist high, wide, solid.
"What is that?" My voice cracked on it.
He took a slow step toward me. "Colleen. Before you get upset —"
"I'm already upset. I've been upset since the dining room."
"That's fair."
"Did you make some kind of deal with this man about my daughter? Yes or no."
Dean winced. "Yes."
I just stared at him.
Behind us the back door opened.
"Mom?" Delaney's voice came across the dark yard. "Where'd everybody go?"
All three of us froze like kids.
"Laney, stay inside!" I called.
"…Why?"
Nolan said, under his breath, "That came out really suspicious."
She was already on the porch, cheesecake in both hands, squinting out at the shapes of us near the shed.
"What are you all doing out there?"
Dean grabbed the corner of the blanket. "We're out of time," he said, and pulled.
The blanket slid off onto the wet grass.
It was a vanity. An old wooden one. Cream paint, a little yellowed. Three small drawers down one side. A round mirror on top with a chip near the twelve o'clock mark and a thin scratch down the left edge, from the time nine-year-old Delaney swung a charm bracelet too close to it.
I knew that vanity in my bones.
I'd bought it for her when she was six. She used to sit at it and sing into a hairbrush and smear on the shimmery drugstore powder she called her "grown-up face," making one ridiculous expression after another until we were both wheezing.
And I knew where it had gone. When she was seventeen she'd carried the mirror out to the garage herself, set it down in front of Dean, and said, "I don't want a piece of furniture in my room whose entire job is to look at me."
I'd assumed, somewhere along the way, that it got donated. Hauled off. Gone.
May you like
I had no idea Dean had it. That he'd spent weeks on it — sanding, repainting, working a bead of glue into that chip in the glass so it wouldn't spread.
"Oh my God… how did you arrange all of this?"
