“Your hands aren’t alright.”
She poured cool water over my palms. Her fingers were steady. Mine were not.
Then she tore open a bandage with her teeth and pressed it to my knee.
I watched the top of her head and felt something I could not name move through my chest. A sense of familiarity.
She gathered my scattered things, then picked up my cap.
For a moment, she studied my face intently.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Robert.”
A strange look crossed her features. Then she nodded.
She handed me the cap. “Nice to meet you, Robert.”
Then she stood and walked back toward the café.
I rode home with my hands stinging and my mind somewhere far behind me, never imagining that meeting that woman had changed my life.
In my bathroom, I peeled the gloves off, set them in the sink, and lifted the cap off my head.
Something slipped from the inside band and fluttered to the tile.
A photograph.
I bent down too fast and the room swam.
It was a photo of Emma, taken when she was four years old. The red sweater her mother had knitted for her, two missing front teeth in a grin so wide it crinkled her eyes.
And I had never seen this picture before in my life.
My hand shook as I turned it over.
The handwriting on the back was careful, deliberate, and unfamiliar.
She didn’t disappear, Robert. I know where. I’ve been waiting twenty years for you to come back to that road. Go to this address. Come alone. Tell no one. You have 24 hours.
An address followed. Twelve miles away.
My knees gave out. I sank down onto the tile until my back hit the tub.
“This is a trick,” I said out loud, to the empty house. “This is somebody’s sick trick.”
See, it wasn’t just the note or the photo, it was the address, too.
I recognized it because it was three houses down from where my grandmother lived before she passed.
My breath caught somewhere it could not climb out of.
As much as I wanted to believe this was a trick, the coincidences told me it wasn’t. More than that, the flutter of hope in my heart told me I had to check it out, just in case.
I pulled out my phone to call my brother, and paused.
Paul would tell me to call Detective Hayes.
Hayes would tell me to sit tight and wait.
I had waited for 20 years. Now, I had to act.
