Page 87 of 56 Days
It’s only afterward he worries that Ciara might have noticed, but she doesn’t say anything.
Georgie’s tells him the food will be ready for collection inforty-fiveminutes.
“Fifteen minutes,” he says to Ciara when he’s ended the call. “I might as well head there now.”
“Want me to come?”
“No.” He clears his throat. “I mean, um, no need. No point in both of us going. Minimize contact and all that, right?”
“Shame we can’t eat outside,” she says, looking wistfully toward the terrace. “When it’s still so warm.”
That envelope was hand delivered to a secure building and it turns out a woman he thought he met randomly outside a hotel a few weeks back lives here too. They aredefinitelynot going out onto that terrace, now or ever again.
“I think I’ve had enough heat for one day,” he says, pointing to his forehead. The skin there has started to feel hot and tight. He checks he has his keys and his wallet and turns to leave. “Back soon.”
He puts on a mask before he goes into the corridor.
Not long after he’d moved into the Crossings, Oliver realized he’d never been given a letterbox key. The next day at work, he’d asked Louise, the office manager, about it. She was tasked with overseeing the employee accommodation but had no idea where the key was. She had the keys for theotherKB Studios apartment, though, which she said no one was using at the time. She’d slippeditsletterbox key off its set and handed it to him, saying, “Think they’re all the same at that place,” with a shrug.
At the time he thought that was an easy way for people to get their property stolen, and made a mental note never to have anything delivered while he was staying there. Today, he hopes she was right—and that hisnext-doorneighbor hasn’t had a sudden urge to check for post this late on a Sunday.
Oliver finds the lobby empty, but there’re a few residents in the courtyard, making the most of the evening sun. None of them are looking his way.
Aware of thefish-eyelens of the CCTV camera hanging behind him, he angles his body into a position he hopes will hide the fact that he’s opening the “wrong” box.
He slips the small key into the lock in the box assigned to apartment number two, holding his breath—
Click.
It turns easily.
Oliver pulls down the flap.
The envelope lies facedown, on top of a postcard advertising meal deals at a local pizza place.
He allows himself one second ofself-delusion, one moment of hoping that everything isn’t about to come crashing down, that this might not be the beginning of yet another end.
Then he reaches into the box and takes it out, turns it over.
Oliver St Ledger.
Handwritten in blue ink. Cursive.
A woman’s hand, he’d guess.
The envelope looks innocuous, its threat invisible—but the fallout from it could be potentially cataclysmic. It’s a shard of graphite ejected from the reactor in a nuclear explosion.
Fear freezes him in place, standing in front of a letterbox that isn’t his, holding an envelope with his real name on it, in a semipublic place.
His heart pounds in his chest.
The paper trembles in his hand.
And then the mental Geiger counter in his head starts to beep, loud and piercingly, once, twice, then several times in rapid succession, and when hestilldoesn’t move it starts to scream in an unbroken,high-pitchedbeep—
Oliver shoves the envelope into a pocket of his jeans, locks up the box, and leaves the building.
Even though April has barely begun, there’s a lazy haze in the air that he associates with summer evenings.
