They Canceled My Ticket, I Canceled Them novel · Chapter 10 of 24
Chapter 10: The Text I Never Wrote
He turned the screen toward me.
It was an old screenshot, a little blurred, with a crack in the glass where the phone had once been dropped.
A gray bubble sat under a line of his own messages.
"Don't come tonight. I changed my mind. Please stop writing to me."
The sender was my name.
The number under it was mine.
I read it three times.
It was not my voice, not one word of it, and it was exactly the kind of message that would end a person.
"It came at four," Wes said. "I was in the kitchen. I stood there with a sandwich in my hand until the bread went dry."
"I never wrote this."
"I know that now."
"You didn't know that an hour ago."
"I knew you for one night. I spent nine years deciding whether that was enough to be sure of you." He lowered the phone. "I decided it wasn't. I was wrong."
Lacey was on her feet by the door.
She had both hands tucked into her cardigan sleeves.
"Wes, Nor. This is awful. You two are exhausted, and I think we've all said things. We can sort it out in daylight."
"You'll stay and answer," Wes said.
"I don't answer to a screenshot."
"Then who sent it?"
"Anyone could have used her phone! It was nine years ago. Everybody lost their phones that summer."
Wes crossed the room and opened the boathouse door wide.
Cold air came in off the lake.
"Good night, Lacey," he said.
She looked at me.
I looked at her.
For ten years I had never once seen her stuck without a smooth thing to say.
She stood there stuck, and then she gathered her cardigan and walked out into the dark without a word.
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