The One Who Waited novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Slip

Derek laughs and leaves to bring Skye painkillers; Merry packs, finds the old ER slip that says DEAL, and calls Luke, whose truck is at her curb by dawn.

Derek stared at my phone for a long second.

Then he laughed.

It was the laugh he used on waiters who brought the wrong wine.

"Luke Darrow. From Rome. The guy who got arrested in Ithaca."

"That's the one."

"You haven't talked to him since college."

"I talked to him three weeks ago."

On the screen was the thirty-first, in red, and two words I'd typed with my left hand in an ER bay.

Marry Luke.

He pushed the phone back at me.

"Okay. I get it. You're upset about Skye, so you dug up the one guy you know I can't stand. Very mature."

"I'm not upset."

"Merry. Babe. He's a carpenter with a record. He lives in a warehouse."

"Above a warehouse."

He blinked.

"You know where he lives?"

Before I could answer, his phone rang.

The screen lit up with a photo of Skye in a sports bra, laughing on a beach.

"Hey," he said, softer than he'd talked to me in a year. "No, I'm up. What happened?"

I could hear her voice through the speaker, small and weepy.

A migraine. She'd taken the last of her pills. The pharmacy by her place was closed.

"Don't move," Derek said. "I'll bring you mine."

He went into our bathroom and came out with the orange bottle from my side of the cabinet.

My prescription.

From the crash he had never asked about.

"I'll be back in an hour," he said, already at the door. "We'll talk when you've calmed down. And Merry? Delete that from your calendar before somebody sees it."

The door shut.

I listened to the elevator go down.

Then I got up and pulled my big suitcase out from under the bed.

I had lived in that apartment for nine years.

It took me twenty minutes to pack what was mine.

Jeans. Chef's whites. My knives in their canvas roll. My good boots. Three sweaters, one of them Tamara's.

Everything else in the place had been chosen by Derek or bought by Steady or given to him by investors who thought I was the help.

The last thing I took down was the recipe tin.

It had been my grandmother's.

Red, dented, with a rooster on the lid, and a rubber band around it because the hinge broke when I was twelve.

I sat on the kitchen floor with it in my lap.

Her cards were inside in her square handwriting.

Pie crust. Apple butter. Chocolate cake with olive oil instead of butter, because she said butter was for people who didn't trust their oven.

At the very back, behind the cake card, was a folded piece of pale green paper.

I had moved it from apartment to apartment for fifteen years.

I had never once let myself unfold it.

Cayuga Medical Center. Patient discharge instructions.

I turned it over.

On the back, in blue ballpoint pressed so hard it had dented the paper, a boy had written four letters and his initials.

DEAL. L.D.

I remembered the plastic chair in that ER.

I remembered the bar towel going pink in his hands.

I remembered being nineteen and high on whatever they'd given me, my shirt cut off at the back, saying something stupid to make the nurse laugh.

"If I'm not married by thirty-four, you have to marry me."

And Luke, twenty, blood on his shirt that was mine, taking the pen off the nurse's clipboard without a word.

Three hours later the police came, and Luke told them he started it.

Derek told me the same thing the next morning.

I believed Derek.

I never called Luke again.

Not until the night of the guardrail.

I looked at the clock on the stove.

Four-oh-six.

I found the number in my recent calls, the one from the business card I'd dug out of the tin that night.

It rang once.

"Merry."

His voice was rough with sleep and completely awake at the same time.

"Did I wake you?"

"Yes. Are you hurt?"

"No."

"Are you safe?"

I looked around the dark kitchen.

At the bowl where Derek tossed his keys.

At the cabinet where my pills used to be.

"I told him," I said. "About the thirty-first."

There was a pause.

I heard a dog shake its collar somewhere near him.

"How'd he take it?"

"He laughed. Then he went to bring his girlfriend my painkillers."

Another pause.

This one longer.

"Where are you?"

"Bank Street. I packed a bag. I don't actually know where I'm going with it."

"Yes you do."

"Luke. It's four in the morning."

"I'm aware. I'm putting my boots on."

"You don't have to."

"I said deal. I didn't say deal unless it's inconvenient."

The line went dead.

I sat on the floor with the slip in one hand and the tin in the other.

At four thirty-one my phone buzzed.

Outside.

I wheeled the suitcase into the elevator, still in my coat.

Bank Street was black and wet and quiet, the trees dripping.

A dark green pickup truck sat at the curb with its engine running.

The driver's door opened.

He was bigger than I remembered.

Taller, heavier through the shoulders, a short beard now, a flannel shirt with the sleeves pushed up like it wasn't October.

The thin white scar still cut through his left eyebrow.

He came around the front of the truck and stopped under the streetlight.

He looked at my face.

My face.

His eyes went to my hairline, to the last yellow edge of the bruise Derek had walked past for three weeks.

His jaw moved once.

"Who do I have to hit?"

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