Chapter 4: Saturday at Nine

"He didn't tell me anything," I said to Dalton. "You just told me everything."

Dalton's mouth opened and closed.

"Who is he?" Amber asked, and her voice had gone flat.

"The neighbor," Dalton said. "He's nobody."

"Then it won't matter that he filmed all of it," I said. "Every sticker, every transfer, the guard's hands on my arm, and you nodding at him."

Dalton looked at Amber, and Amber looked at the street.

She reached over and switched off the tripod.

"Eleven thousand followers gone since I woke up," she said, almost to herself. "Eleven thousand."

I turned to the three of us on the porch, the guard, Amber and the man I had planned to marry.

"You have until noon," I said. "Take your clothes and your suitcases and leave my house."

Next door, a woman in a bathrobe had come out to water nothing.

Two houses down, a man stood with a leaf blower he wasn't using.

Dalton noticed them too, and his shoulders came up.

"Fine," he said. "We'll talk when you're calm."

"I'm calm now," I said.

Hattie followed me inside, and we both stopped in the hall.

The living room smelled of spilled wine and sweat.

Paper cups lay on every shelf and on the piano bench, and someone had left a plate of cold wings on my grandmother's side table.

I walked straight to the study.

The door stood open.

The desk was gone, the lamp was gone, and the shelves that had held four hundred and twelve books stood bare.

A heap of red stickers lay in the middle of the rug where someone had swept them.

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