May 29, 1:17pm May 31, 4:44pm June 3, 7:41pm June 3, 7:46pm June 3, 8:29pm

May 29, 1:17pm

The man looks at the clock he had hung above his office door. Only seven of the thirty minutes scheduled for this so-called meeting have elapsed. As the blond on the other side of the desk drones on about being “made to feel uncomfortable” as the result of “inappropriate commentary and gestures” from some of her “straight cis male-presenting colleagues” (whatever the fuck that means), he knows the moment she walks out, he’s going to fire whoever put this shit on his calendar.

He wants to tell the woman that if she doesn’t want the men in the building to speak to her the way she’s alleging, she should ditch the fitted dresses, pencil skirts, half-buttoned blouses, and high heels that he knows she knows show off her tight little body and long legs. Definitely does Pilates, this one. But he knows he can’t say any of that (even though it’s true). It would be considered “blaming the victim” according to that asinine DEI course HR made everyone go through.

Which was really fucking annoying. He’s the goddamn CEO for crying out loud! HE is supposed to be calling the shots around here, not that dumpy little creature his COO put in charge of “interpersonal culture and company morale”. The woman was shaped like a minifridge and surely hadn’t seen a dick in at least a decade.

Utter and complete misuses of his time, that training and this “meeting”. Shit’s unacceptable! Don’t these people know he has real work to do? Projected earnings for this quarter aren’t looking good (he’d still like to throttle the label’s top artist for failing to keep his little fetishes in check… the whole sex dungeon scandal was a massive blow to sales), and he’s been working his ass off to rebound. But how the hell’s he supposed to get anything of significance done when he’s got trivial shit like this “meeting” on his calende—

“Sir, no disrespect, but are you even listening to me?” The girl… well woman, he guesses—fucking “Gen-Zs” always seemed to straddle the adult/child line—says. Dragging him back into his wretched reality. God, what a fucking waste of time!

He takes a deep breath and smiles. “I am. And I’m deeply sorry to hear about the series of unpleasant encounters—”

“‘Unpleasant’??” she balks. “Are you even serious right now?”

It’s a struggle not to roll his eyes. “Again: I’m sorry for the negative experiences you’ve had. Please know that we take the wellbeing of our team members very seriously and that—”

A loud chime rings through the air (As though calling bullshit? he wonders), and his eyes drop to the row of four cell phones lying face up just behind his closed laptop. When he sees which one screen is lit, he stops breathing.

It vibrates and chimes again.

New Message

Which…

There’s no fucking way. 

When the same thing happened last night—he received a message on that particular phone—he reasoned it away as a wrong number text (though he admittedly hadn’t read what it said). But to receive two texts within twelve hours… after getting none for over a year—

He swears the room has gotten hotter.

There’s only one contact in that phone, and said contact is the only person who had the number. Well… was the only person. And even if that person had given the number to someone else, he had the damn thing set up where only calls or messages from that singular contact could get through—

“You uhhh… need to check that?” The disgruntled young lady’s voice again hits his thoughts. This time, like a straight pin to the balloon of his tenuously contained rage. His eyes, surely a deeper shade of green than normal considering his mood, snap up and lock onto her blue ones. Which widen as her jaw clamps shut.

Good.

He looks at the phone again. The screen has gone dark now, but there’s no unseeing what was there.

It just… can’t be possible. She’s gone. Been gone for over a year. Like not coming back, gone. He’s sure of it. No, he wasn’t there when her… permanent gone-ness was secured. But Brett told him it was done, and he believed it. There’s no one on earth he trusts more than Brett.

So, what the fuck is this?

The number’s been reassigned. That’s it. No, it doesn’t really explain how the person who now has it came across his (super top secret) number, but perhaps that’s mere coincidence. It has to be.

The full body flush he experiences when under duress is creeping up his legs now. All that mindfulness and meditation and “grounding in his body” bullshit Brett made him do after he almost had a heart attack a couple years ago (“You’re only thirty-two!” As if he didn’t know that?) made him hyperaware of shifting physical sensations. The heat that started in his toes is now crawling up his midsection. Soon it’ll hit his neck. And then his face. He’d prefer that the idiot trout sitting across from him not see it.

She really is wicked hot.

A drop of sweat rolls down his right side from his armpit. And his eyes flick to the phone again.

I told you to get rid of that thing, says the voice of his “inner critic”. She’d dead. At your behest. You look like a fucking lunatic.

Does he look like a lunatic? Maybe he does look like a lunatic… He really only kept the device—and keeps it fully charged, turned on, and on hand at all times—because…

Well, because…

Fuck, he really might be a lunatic.

But there was that one book he read in college… Catch-22, he thinks it was called? The one thing that stuck was the idea that if you think you might be a lunatic, you’re probably not one. If you were, you wouldn’t think you are.

Or something.

The phone lights up again. Not with another new message, but with the reminder that there are two sitting unread.

Before he can think too much about it, he puts his thumb on the circle beneath the device’s screen.

Message from last night:

Heya, stranger. Miss me?

And this new one:

I’d like to see you. Can that be arranged?

He reads the messages again. And again.

Squints. Wrinkles his nose.

Bites his bottom lip. Nods once.

And sits back in his chair. 

The woman across from him just stares, lips sealed. And for a beat he stares back.

She opens her mouth to speak, and he puts a hand up to stop her.

“I don’t think this company is the right fit for you, sweetheart,” he says in that decidedly final way he does. The only person to ever effectively challenge him on it is his wife.

“Excuse me?” comes the silly little dingbat’s reply.

“You’re fired,” he says. “I wish you the best. You can go now.”

Only as she walks away does he feel the ghost of remorse: there will be so much less to look at once she’s gone.

May 31, 4:44pm

She waits with her back against the door and her heart in her throat until she hears the 1-2-3 of a slammed car door, cranked engine, and squeal of tires pulling out of the driveway.

Had the woman—Lyriq, she believes her name is… Felice had shown her a photo once—really parked in the driveway?? Was her aim to trap Thomas in the house if he had actually been here?

She was telling the truth when she said he wasn’t. He’d been gone for a few days. Likely staying at that little condo in the city he thinks she doesn’t know about. The one above the coffee shop he’s also hiding from her. She knows about all of it.

The parking move… the whole approach even, was just so bold. It was kind of a turn-on. Lyriq was rather stunning. She’d clearly gotten a breast reduction or something because the breasts she’d seen in the picture were gone, but still. She could see why Felice had gotten so caught up—

She had to pull it together.

As soon as she’d closed the door in the woman’s face, the baby stopped crying, buried her face in her mama’s neck, and went to sleep.

Fucking fuck shit ass bitch goddammit, goddammit, goddammit. She hated cursing this way, even when it was just in her head. Had Lyriq noticed the resemblance Thomas is too self-absorbed to pick up on? “She’s adopted” was typically the only phrase needed to explain why their little girl was darker than her mommy despite having a white daddy… but even at a year old, Felice’s distinctive facial features were hard to miss in the shape of the baby’s eyes, the curve of her slightly upturned nose, and her full lips.

Lyriq totally noticed. If Felice’s stories about their love affair were true, she had to have noticed. Nobody who’d truly seen Felice could forget her face. It was why the other girl showing up to interview—Damaris—had been such a shock: Damaris’s resemblance to Felice is uncanny.

Well… was uncanny. She hasn’t seen Damaris in days. Not since Thomas, giving precisely zero detail or explanation, came in from work four nights ago and told her that Damaris wouldn’t be returning to help her with the baby.

She didn’t ask any questions. There was no point: he wouldn’t have told her anything.

But Lyriq showing up on her doorstep is suspect. How had she gotten the address? Did Lyriq know Damaris was working here? She certainly knew about Damaris’s job in Lyriq’s world. She hadn’t been able to sniff out a whole lot about Damaris in her online sleuthing—the girl didn’t have a single social media account—but after seeing Damaris, something told her to check the Boom Town roster online. Ever since Thomas took a stake in the club—another thing he hadn’t told her about—he’d been a real stickler for keepin the website updated.

And there Damaris was. On the dayshift page.

Charm.

Did it surprise her when she decided to check that roster again the day after Thomas told her Damaris wasn’t coming back, and she discovered that Charm’s name and photo had both disappeared? Hell yeah it did. Surprised the shit out her.

But she minded her business. Already had too many things to hide.

That’s gotta change now, though. Because, at best, Lyriq is suspicious… but at worse she knows something. Why else would she come over here? Had she somehow made a different connection and come looking for Felice? There was no way, right? Far too late for all that…

It clicks: the car that was sitting across the road a couple of days ago? Same car that was in her driveway. Lyriq was totally staking the place out.

It’s time for them to move.

After putting the baby down, she goes to the pantry to retrieve her secret phone from inside the big plastic container of rice. She smiles at how ridiculous it is: Thomas is so diametrically opposed to preparing any sort of meal for himself, she’d successfully hidden his Rolex, car keys, and a hundred-thousand dollars cash in the pantry; he noticed the watch and keys were missing but hadn’t even thought to look in there.

She dials.

“What happened?” comes a voice through the receiver without a hello. “Something happened.”

“Lyriq stopped by.”

“Excuse me, what?”

“You heard what I said.”

The other end of the of the line goes eerily quiet.

“Are… you still there?” she says into the phone. Or are you thinking about her now? she wants to add but doesn’t. There’s no point.

“More here than ever,” comes the reply. “Kinda hate it for me.”

“Yeah, well we need to get outta here before things escalate. We’ve worked too hard and come too far.”

“Guess our luck’s run out, huh?”

“That isn’t remotely funny,” she snaps. “And I have no interest in going to jail. So just get your shit together so we can jet. We need to be on our way out of town by tomorrow morning.”

June 3, 7:41pm

The messages catch the driver off guard. Not because there’s anything particularly strange about them: the girl is—was—young and beautiful. It makes sense for her to have had some… dealings. With young men. In the past.

And these were definitely from the past. The most recent text—one that this Todd guy “left on read” as the driver once heard the girl say about a message he hadn’t responded to—was from seven months ago.

But still. In all the times she’d rambled on about her life and her dreams and her regrets and all the things she was confused about, she never mentioned a Todd.

The driver doesn’t like it. It feels like the introduction of an unexpected variable. And there’s no room for any unexpected variables.

Any more unexpected variables, that is. Because this traffic certainly hadn’t been part of the plan. He’s half an hour behind schedule, and if he’s late to the meeting he set, his whole alibi is out the window.

He really wishes the light would change.

He sighs and shakes his head as he looks back down at the girl’s phone. It was a mistake, deciding to go through it. He can see that now. He’d be a lot more at ease if he hadn’t done it. Because who the hell was Todd? And what had their situation been?

He scrolls to reread through the thread for the umpteenth time.

Can we please just try again?
DW, I already told you this is
done. It shouldn’t have ever
happened in the first place.

You say that, but we both know
you don’t mean it.

It’ll be different this time, I promise.

Please stop texting me, Damaris.

I’ve gotten my life back on track
and it needs to stay that way.

This whole thing was a mistake and
I’m not interested in making any
additional ones.

You’re young and beautiful and have
a whole long life ahead of you. Go
live it.

That’s what you don’t seem to
understand.

I don’t want to live it without YOU.

Please let’s just try one more time.

We’re SO good together, Todd.

Even YOU said that. Remember?

I know you miss me, babe. Meet me
tonight at our spot. My parents will
never know.

I’m good at keeping secrets from
them.

The driver puts the phone down and taps the steering wheel. He doesn’t like this one single bit.

It was supposed to be easy this time. She even said, “If I were to disappear, no one would come looking for me.” Yeah, she was high—he’d drugged the shit out of her on her first night in the condo (not that she would know)—but he believed her.

Because she was believable. And deep feeling. And earnest. That had been a huge part of her appeal. You just didn’t see that type of genuineness these days. That sort of purity of spirit.

These were also the reasons she had to be gotten rid of, obviously. People who feel too much cause problems: they eventually crack and spill all the secrets. The girl absolutely had this tendency.

Or at least she seemed to. This whole Todd thing though… That had clearly been a secret. How much else had she not told the driver? She told him a lot. Far too much, really. And he believed her.

But Todd…
She hadn’t told him about Todd.

Why hasn’t the light turned green?

He drums the steering wheel a tad more fervently and shakes his head. Really shouldn’t have read those messages. Because now the other she is in his head.

Felice.

Goddammit. This is all going to shit. The driver can feel it. And he should’ve known better. That’s what’s hitting him now.

He’s been through this shit before, hasn’t he? This girl has—had—Todd… and Felice had “Micah.” Micah who was (supposedly) in Felice rearview. A thing of the past.

The driver only knew about Micah because he’d gone through Felice’s phone one night while she was asleep at the apartment. And just like now, he hated himself for it afterwards.

Realizing and accepting the idea that he wasn’t the only person someone shared hidden parts of themself with wasn’t the same thing as suspecting that it was true. There were so many things he’d had to admit he didn’t know about Felice.

They always fucked things up, the unknowns.

A different phone—not the girl’s; he wisely (if you ask him) put hers on do not disturb—pings with an incoming message. Panic shoots through the driver’s body so ferociously, he’s pretty sure he just peed.

His steering wheel drumming intensifies.

The light finally turns green, but no one moves. Too much traffic. Cars from the cross street are now blocking the intersection.

The other (different) phone pings again.

This cannot be happening. It can’t. It’s not possible. Brett assured the driver that the other job was done. Someone is having a good gag is all. Has to be.

There’s no way the message he got three days ago—Heya, stranger! Miss me?—on a phone only one person has ever had the number for actually came from that person. There’s no way in hell or on earth.

Because that person was dead.
IS dead. Has been dead. For over a year.

Maybe Brett was right, and the driver is “clinically insane.” Why else would he keep paying for cell service on a phone only a dead person knows about—fully charged, and within reach at all times? Did he maybe want this random-impossible-message thing to happen someday? Because that would mean—

No. This is simple: Felice’s old number was assigned to someone new and by some glitch (or something), the number to the driver’s secret phone popped up in that number’s memory.
Or something.

A tap on the window knocks the driver from his thought spiral (which is a blessing), and he lowers it without thinking.

“Sir, my name’s Josephine, and I am an unhoused individual,” the woman says. “Might you have any spare change? If not, I also have Cashapp—”

“Get your druggy ass away from my car—!”

A car honks from behind: traffic is moving now.

“RAAAAAAAH!” the driver screams at the homeless woman as he punches the accelerator far harder than expressly necessary. Has he gone feral? Maybe.

He’s definitely not looking at where he’s going, though: A city bus has turned right in front of him.

“Look out!” the unhoused woman shouts, and the driver turns his head just in time to swerve. He hits the left corner of the bus’s thick, rubber bumper.

Everything goes quiet.

There’s the hiss and thump of the bus shifting into park. The driver’s sure there’s some external damage to the car, but none of the airbags deployed. Which means the it’s still drivable. He needs to get the hell out of here, and quick. Cops show up and decide they need to check the trunk…

Yeah, he’s gotta go.

Moving nothing but his eyes—click, click, click—he checks all three mirrors to make sure he’s in the clear.

“Karma’s a bitch, ain’t it?!” the unhoused woman is shouting now. “Ya meanie! That’s why ya fucked up your lil Honda—”

Quick as he can, the driver shifts into reverse and backs up just enough to get around the bus. Then he throws it in drive and floors it.

It’s the strangest thing he’s ever seen, but when checks the rearview again to make sure no one is following him, he could swear the unhoused woman is holding her hands up like she’s taking a picture.

June 3, 7:46pm

He’s gonna have to ditch the car sooner rather than later. No clue how bad the damage is to the front fender—and he doesn’t dare stop to get out and look—but he does know multiple people saw him hit that godforsaken bus. (Where the hell had it even come from?!)

Someone in addition to that wretch of a homeless man—whom the driver swears he can still smell—surely got his tag info. Which really isn’t great considering who this car is registered to. He hits the steering with the butt of his palm. Once. Twice. Three, four, five, six, seven, eight times. He really didn’t think this through. Yes, this vehicle is—well, was—far less conspicuous than his truck…

But the tag. The fucking tag.

Now his mind is racing.

Heya, stranger! Miss me?

Even the thought of her voice—and he’s been thinking of it often—makes him feel like his ears are bleeding.

He’d taken Brett’s word that the job was done. He always took Brett’s word. Always. Didn’t think anything else of it. Not consciously, at least.

But then that message. And the ones he just got—that’s really the reason he didn’t notice the bus, isn’t it? Hearing that phone chime had made his brain… blip or something. First the traffic, then the pinging, then the homeless man, then the bus. It was just his fucking luck.

Or… lack thereof, he guesses.

There’s no way it’s actually her. He believed Brett. Brett wouldn’t lie to him. Definitely not about something like this.

But there are so many new questions now. Even if Brett was telling the truth and this whole message thing is some sort of fucked up prank from the universe: Had a missing person’s report ever been filed? If some random cop ran the tag on the car he’s currently fucking driving, would the system pull up some sort of missing person’s vehicle alert? She’s the one who told him “nobody ever looks for the Black girl.”

He'd believed her, too.

All of this had gone so fucking wrong. If his wife would’ve just given him the baby he wanted, none of this would be happening. And fine, they had Felicity now, and he loved her like she was his own—to the point where he could swear he sometimes saw himself in the shape of the little girl’s eyes—but it’d been too late. The damage was months done by then.

And to think he’d ruined a chance at legacy that was actively gestating to save his goddamn reputation.

Nothing is going the way he needs it to.

He has to get rid of this car. Which means he needs a plan B, and fast.

That’s what he should’ve told her to take the morning after—

Fuck! Why was everything so messed up?

He stops at another red light. No, he hasn’t gotten quite as far out of town as he’d like, but the river is still nearby. He’ll just have to head toward it sooner.

How had she been taken out? What had been done with her body? He never asked. Honestly didn’t want to know. It was easier to just not think about any of it. The more time passed, the less real it all felt.

But that message.

Without thinking too much about it, he opens the center console and pulls out the other phone. Glances at the screen.

Three new messages.

He has to check them. He knows he does. There’s no way he can’t.

But first he’s gotta dispose himself of the dead girl in the trunk.

And then he’s gotta get rid of this car.

June 3, 8:29pm

XYN 3482.
XYN 3422.
XYN 3482.
X
                               	Y
                                                                   	82
                                                                                           	3
                    	N  X
                                                                                                                   	48
XYN
The driver grips the steering wheel at ten and two—
348234823482
but keeps cutting his eyes at the phone in the cup holder.
XY
        	284
None of this can be real, can it?
                               	NYX
There’s no way she’s alive. Brett told him the job was done.
And then she’d promised him a baby!
842NY
And she delivered on that promise, Brett did. Because Brett didn’t lie to him.
Ever.
Brett is his everything.
XYN 3482
At least he thinks she is… She has to be. Because he’s her everything.
It’s just the tag. That’s all. He hadn’t thought about the tag when he decided—
                                           	XYN 3482
Yes, he’d been the one who’d paid for the car, even though Brett’s name was on the title. And yes, it had been Brett’s idea to “register the car in the name of the person who’d be driving it.” It made perfect sense at the time, putting it in her name. There was no way his or Brett’s names could pop up were some cop to randomly run the plates. And God forbid she got pulled over or had an accident…
They couldn’t be tied to that. It had to be in her name. There was no other option.
It was a good decision. 
He just… forgot about it until he hit that damn bus.
XYN 3482
Now it’s right there, top of mind. Bringing with it all the unanswered questions he’s had since he’d gotten that first damn message.
She was dead. IS dead. Brett told him so. And Brett would not lie.
XYN 3482
Especially not about this.
Though there was that one time… he’d come home earlier than she was expecting, and when she saw him, she’d rushed off a phone call. He’d told himself he was imagining the panicked look in her eyes when they met his. Like she’d been caught—
No, no, no. It’s Brett for fuck’s sake. Brett would never betray him.
Brett knew better.
She’d told him the truth. Which meant all this…
XYN 3482
Somebody’s playing a trick on him. That’s it. The girl. The girl has to be involved in all this. She’d tricked him with her innocence, and he’d trusted her.
But she’d known too much, the girl had. She’d “found a journal” she said. That’s how she knew those things about Felice…
Though when he asked to see the journal, she claimed she’d thrown it away… And it’s not like the girl had said Felice’s name. She probably hadn’t even known it.
The girl did not know Felice. She couldn’t have. Was there an uncanny resemblance? Yes. That part couldn’t be denied.
Felice never mentioned a younger sister, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t have one. And the girl would’ve had to have been her sister, right? They were too close in age to be… any other relation.
And anyway: it’s all moot now, isn’t it?
XYN 3482
Even if the girl was a relative of Felice’s and she did know what he’d done, it didn’t matter now. She was dead, too. He’d made sure of it this time by doing the dirty work himself.
Whatever trick the little bitch was trying to play had failed.
XYN 3482
The phone lights up in the cup holder again.
Another message.
His mind is playing tricks on him again. That’s all. Guilty conscience fucking with his head. It’ll subside.
He exhales and slows to a stop at the traffic light.
Then picks up the phone to read the new message.