Page 72 of Her Sloth

Of all the things, this wasn’t on my list of things for today.

“You should’ve listened to my advice,” she says as she lets go of me and laughs.

“I did listen to it,” I say, walking over to the door and closing it. I need to get out of the closeness. “Unfortunately, life caught up with me.”

She’s still making me nervous. She was the first girl I ever had a crush on, something she shall never know.

“Very unfortunate,” she says in a tone I can’t really place.

“What brings you here?” I ask directly.

“I recently got married,” she says.

“Um—okay,” I say, because this is not going anywhere where I expected it to go.

“My lovely wife, who is driving me nuts every day, is very good at many things, first and foremost at solving walking and breathing problems and secondly at gaining information.”

Walking and breathing problems. So she’s a serial killer or what?

I take a step back, because right now, she scares me. Did she get wind of what we’re trying to do? That it was us?

My heart skips several beats. If she knows⁠—

Fuck.

Lilian is, after all, one of the ‘elitist families’ as Cass calls them, who will be affected by what we are going to do.

“And what does that have to do with me?” I ask, pretending I am not planning to disrupt world markets and self-destruct everything in the process.

She slips an envelope from her bag and holds it out for me to take.

I take it, not breaking the gaze into her eyes. Her look is unreadable.

Only when I fumble it open and pull out what’s inside do I look at what I hold in my hand.

She’s probably trying to blackmail me.

Her wife must have figured out⁠—

My mouth drops open.

There are photos, but not the ones I expected.

They are photos of my dead father.

Photos of what he did⁠—

One hand shoots in front of my mouth.

No.

I can’t⁠—

A photo of him hanging dead⁠—

I get sick to my stomach and stuff them back into the envelope, my hands trembling.

“How—“ I begin.