A Decade For Nothing novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: The One With the Paper

I slept at Nan's house, in the bedroom I'd had until I was nineteen.

At seven in the morning the smell of bacon came up the stairs and found me.

Joel was already at the kitchen table, in yesterday's shirt, eating toast with his shoes off.

He had slept on the couch.

"Your phone has been going all night," he said. "I turned it face down. It still hums."

"How many?"

"I stopped counting at ninety."

Nan stood at the stove with her good hand on the pan and her cast held up out of the grease.

"Sit," she said. "Eat. Then I'll show you something."

I sat.

I ate three strips of bacon and one egg without tasting them.

When I turned my phone over, it showed forty-one messages from people I hadn't spoken to in years.

Most said they were sorry.

Two said they always knew.

My manager at the hospital had sent one line: Take the week. No questions.

I put the phone back face down.

"Here," Nan said.

She opened the drawer under the toaster, the one where she kept rubber bands and dead batteries, and took out a folded sheet of paper.

She smoothed it on the table.

It was the discharge form from the emergency room.

Patient: Ada Harrow. Arrived 10:41 p.m. Discharged 1:52 a.m. Left wrist, fractured, cast applied.

At the bottom, in my own handwriting, was my signature as her ride home.

Joel read it over my shoulder and let out a low whistle.

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