Page 26 of Last Flame
I’m up before I decide to be. The chair shoots back and hits the shelf. Sorry. Not the priority.
I yank the door open and throw myself into the hallway.
Nothing.
Both directions, empty. Mrs. Kaiser’s welcome mat. A long stretch of carpet that needs vacuuming. No one. The elevator isn’t humming, isn’t moving, the little light over the doors sitting dark on my floor like it hasn’t been called in an hour.
Stairs.
I shove through the stairwell door hard enough to bang it off the wall.
Nothing. No footsteps going down. No breathing. No door clicking shut three floors below me. Just the hum of the building and my own pulse going stupid in my ears.
And I was fast. IknowI was fast. I crossed a one-bedroom apartment and got the door open in — what, two seconds? Three? You do not slide a note under a door and evaporate in three seconds. You don’t make it to the stairs. You don’t make it to the elevator. There is nowhere togoin three seconds.
Nobody’s that fast.
Right?
The walk back to my apartment is slow.
It is not a walk of shame. I have nothing to be ashamed of. If anything it’s a walk ofI’ll-get-you-next-time, fucker— except there’s no fucker. There’s no one to get. You can’t even storm properly when the person you’re storming at has evaporated.
I reach my doorway and then I just stand there. Like a moron. Like a woman who’s forgotten how doors work.
Because I can see it from here. And I don’t want to go in.
The note. Folded once. Sitting a couple of feet inside my apartment like it’s waiting for me to come back and deal with it.
I pick it up. Go in. Lock the door, which feels both essential and completely pointless given the last ten minutes.
I unfold it.
My heart is pounding. Why is that a thing right now. It’s paper.
You don’t have to earn every good thing.
Huh.
I read it again. Then I stand there holding it, being deeply weird about it, because the others were easy. The others I could deal with.Your light reaches farther than you know— sure, okay, that’s tote-bag wisdom, that’s a candle with a saying on it, that could be slid under any door in America and land somewhere.Always listen to your heart— great, thanks, that’s the inside of a gas-station fortune cookie. Those were the wrong door. I told myself they were the wrong door and I moved on, and I did not, at any point, think about why I didn’t throw them away.
This one is different.
Which is insane, becausewho knows that about me.
It’s not Ashley. Ashley would never. Ashley would walk up and say it to my face and then make me talk about my mother.
Because — fine. Yes. The not-earning-good-things thing. Taking what shows up and not making it weird. That’s a me thing. That’s a thing I do. And I’ve never said it out loud, to anyone, ever, because it’s mine and it stays in my head where it can’t embarrass me. I definitely didn’t write it on a card and slide it under my own door.
So somebody guessed.
Which is…
No.
They couldn’t have.
Because they don’t know.
