Page 36 of When He Calls

I close the notebook and head to the bathroom for a quick shower, towel off and head back to work.

Four days. The countdown has its own heartbeat now. Each day is a day closer to his doorway, his face, his hands reaching for a man he's already let inside him without knowing it.

Just past midnight, the line rings, the way it always does.

Chapter Thirteen: Milo

Three days before Halloween and the neighborhood is fully decorated.

Every house on Ridgeway has committed. The Andersons' yard is a graveyard, foam headstones pushed into the grass at angles, a rubber hand reaching out of the dirt near the mailbox. The Delgados hung a twelve-foot skeleton from the oak in their front yard, the bones swaying when the wind picks up, the jaw wired open. Mrs. Kim, who grows dahlias and waves at Bean every morning from May through September, has covered her porch in fake cobwebs so thick the front door is barely visible.

My apartment is October-proof. No decorations. No candy. No pumpkin on the step because a pumpkin means participation and participation means the door opens and the door opening means faces, masks, the small bodies in costumes that shouldn't scare me but do because the costumes are the point, the transformation is the point, a child dressed as something dead is still something dead standing on my doorstep asking me to look at it.

Noor sent a text at 6:00 a.m. Boston time.

Three days. How are you.

She does this every year. Starting October 28, the texts arrive daily. The language stripped of anything that could read as pressure. She learned years ago that asking are you okay during the last week of October produces silence, and silence between us is the thing she won't tolerate, so she adjusted. The texts became statements. Three days. The number and the acknowledgment. I'm here. I know what's coming. You don't have to answer but I need you to read it.

I'm okay. Actually okay.

The three dots. Disappear. Appear.

The phone person?

Yeah.

And?

And I'm sleeping. Taking trazodone. Eating. Working. Bean is fine.

That's a list of functions, Milo. I asked about a person.

My thumb hovers. The truth about Brantley is a paragraph I don't know how to compress into a text. The truth about Brantley is that his voice is the reason I'm sleeping, eating, working. His voice is the mechanism underneath every function on the list she's asking about. Without the midnight calls my sleep would be three hours of ceiling, my eating would be half sandwiches going stale in the fridge, my work would be staring at Vyne's chronology without seeing the fix.

He makes the fear feel like it isn't the whole story.

Send. The sentence sits on the screen. Too honest for a text. Not honest enough for what it actually means.

That's either beautiful or concerning and I genuinely can't tell.

Both probably.

I'm here if it goes sideways. Any direction of sideways.

I know.

The phone goes on the counter and editing starts. Vyne's novel is in the final stretch, the protagonist standing in her vineyard at dawn, the decision made, the consequences arriving. The prose has settled into itself. The author's voice is carrying the weight without my notes propping it up anymore. She gained her voice in the second half. I'm reading more than marking. The tracked changes are single words, a comma moved, a sentence end tightened. The quiet part of editing, where the book is almost the book.

My focus holds for two hours. Then the thought arrives, the way it arrives every afternoon now, uninvited, persistent, taking up space. The man at the coffee shop. The conversation yesterday, the one about the novel, the one where he said behavioral ecology and parasitic relationships. Where I said that sounds like a novel I'm editing. His hand tightened on his book in a way that made me look at his hands.

His hands. The knuckles. The fingers holding the paperback. The way the book sat in his grip, easy, like he is someone who reads with his whole hand, not just his fingertips.

I've been thinking about his hands since, which is a completely normal and not at all unhinged thing to do.

Bean is asleep on the couch. The apartment is quiet. The cursor blinks on Vyne's manuscript. My thoughts are split between this manuscript and a man at an outdoor table. The split is getting wider, the two halves pulling apart. In the gap between them is the other man. The voice. Brantley. The midnight calls, the low rumble, the way he said come for me and meant it in every direction the words could travel.

Two men. One a face without a voice. One a voice without a face. My body wants to combine them. My brain knows the combination doesn't exist. The wanting persists anyway, irrational, physical, lodged in my chest the way the soreness lodged in my hips two days ago, present and unexplained and impossible to ignore.