Chapter 4: Shay's Closet

I took a picture of both labels with my own phone.

Then I carried both boxes up the three flights.

I set them on the gold mat, side by side, and photographed them for the scanner.

I didn't knock.

I had a hundred and forty stops left, and I made every one of them.

When I got back to the depot that night, the lot was empty except for the security light.

I didn't go home to the garage.

I went into the drivers' room and logged into the old terminal by the vending machine.

Every stop we make gets a record.

The time, the GPS, the photo, and the name of whoever shipped it.

I typed in 1180 Larkspur Court, 3B, and went back fourteen months.

It took the printer twenty minutes to spit it all out.

Then I took the stack out to my car, turned the heat on, and went through it with a highlighter.

The shopping app boxes came first.

Forty-one of them.

Each one with a little gift slip I'd never once read, signed with a K.

Then the plain brown boxes.

A man in Columbus. Nineteen boxes since last spring.

A man in Cincinnati. Twelve.

A man in Springfield. Nine.

A man in Indianapolis. Fourteen.

A man in Lexington, Kentucky. Seven.

Six senders.

And every photo on every record showed the same gold mat and the same pair of hands.

Mine.

Somebody knocked on my window.

I nearly put the highlighter through the roof.

Mitch was standing there in his Army jacket, holding a thermos.

I rolled the window down.

"Grandpa's thermos," he said, lifting it. "He'll disown me if I lose another one. What are you doing out here? It's nine o'clock."

Keep reading free with an account. Start My Husband Kept Sending Packages to Ex, So I Filed for Divorce from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.