Page 58 of Patch

The glass front doors were heavy. I pushed through them into the parking lot. Cold air. Security lights doing their job. Yellow, buzzing, throwing enough light to see shapes and not enough to read plates from a distance.

The lot was mostly empty. Sunday evening. Handicapped spaces near the door. Staff cars in the row to the left. The usual geography of a place that closed at nine and it was pushing eight-thirty.

At the far edge, past the handicapped spaces and the staff row, a single vehicle sat parked at an angle that faced the exit.

Not the entrance. The exit. The specific angle of something that wasn’t waiting to arrive. It was waiting to leave. Or waiting to see who left.

I went still.

I had learned, in the last while, to notice things that sat wrong. The backroom standing open. The recut key. The unhurried quality of men who expected a building to be empty. This car sat wrong. The angle. The placement. The fact that it was the only vehicle on that side of the lot when the staff row had three empty spaces closer to the door.

My hand found my jacket pocket. The phone came out cold. The screen lit my face when I pressed the button. Blue light. Too bright. I squinted.

Patch’s number was there.

My thumb hovered over it.

The car sat at the far edge of the lot. Plate unreadable from this distance. Dark sedan. Rental, maybe.

Not a man in the car. Not an escort. That number where you don’t have to go looking for it.

I pressed it.

It rang twice.

“Maren.”

“I’m at Maple Grove. North lot. There’s a dark sedan parked at the far edge facing the exit, and I can’t read the plate from here.” It came out fast and clinical, the way it comes out when I’m frightened. “Ruth’s inside. She’s in her room. She doesn’t know anything’s wrong.”

Two seconds of nothing on the other end. I could hear him moving.

“Don’t go to your car. Walk to the front desk, stand where the aide can see you, and stay on this phone.”

“How long?”

“Forty minutes if I’m polite.”

“Don’t be polite.”

I got maybe nine steps toward those front doors.

I didn’t remember most of what came after in the order it happened. I knew that was normal, but it infuriated me anyway, because I had spent six years being the person who remembered the order of things. I remembered gravel. I remembered a hand across my mouth that smelled like cigarettes and motor oil, which was the same thing Patch smelled like, and which was the detail my brain chose to keep out of all the details available.

I remembered the phone hitting the ground still connected.

And I remembered thinking, with the last clear thought I had for a while, that Vasha had stood at my window on purpose, and that standing there was going to turn out to be the whole difference.

Chapter Thirteen

Patch

I had her on the phone when it happened.

That was the part I was going to carry. Not the drive. Not the door. Four seconds of gravel and cloth, and a sound she made that was not a word. Then the phone hitting the ground and staying connected. And me standing in a clubhouse hallway miles away, listening to a parking lot in Maple Grove with a doorframe under my hand.

I heard a car door.

I heard the engine.