Chapter 14: Melina's Phone

On Thursday at lunch I found Melina sitting in her car in the clinic parking lot.

The back seat was full of cardboard boxes and a lamp with its shade jammed on crooked.

She had the window rolled down two inches.

I got in the passenger side and shut the door.

"You're moving," I said.

"I moved. This is the rest." She held the steering wheel with both hands. "Winston carried the boxes down. He didn't say one cruel thing."

"That's good."

"I wish he had." Her voice cracked. "I wish he'd yelled."

I looked at my friend, who had once cried at a kindergarten recital because a boy sang the wrong verse.

She had filmed me from a dock, and I didn't know what to do with my hands.

"You filmed us," I said.

"I know."

"You stood there and filmed it."

"I know. I'll know it every day." She turned to look at me. "I'm not asking you to forgive me. I'm asking you to take this."

She opened her palm.

A thumb drive lay in it, black and small, with a strip of masking tape across it.

Melina's small round handwriting said: Copy 1.

"Winston made me label it," she said. "He said I should hand over the original and keep nothing."

"What's on it?"

"Everything since March."

She ticked it off on her fingers.

Every text Vera had ever sent her. Every voice note. The photo of Vera's phone screen with the baby thread.