Too Late to Love Me novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: Three Proofs
The stranger predicts three small things and every one comes true; then Hattie shows June a painting Regan just posted.
I stood up on the stoop with the dripping portrait in front of me.
"Nice stunt," I said.
"Did you pay somebody to follow me, or did you do it yourself?"
The man in the black coat shook his head.
"I didn't follow you."
"I got here two hours before you did and waited."
His voice was Zachary's voice, but it was quieter and it had no show in it.
"Zachary is at his party," I said.
"Zachary is on a stage with his hand over his mouth, wondering why nobody is laughing anymore."
"You can see him from here?"
"I was him, once," the man said.
"Call me Zane."
"That's my middle name, and it's the one my mother used before she stopped using any."
"I'm not calling you anything," I said.
I got my key out and held it between my knuckles the way Hattie had taught me.
He looked at the key and almost smiled.
"Good," he said.
"Hold it like that."
He climbed the steps slowly, and I let him come up two of them before I told him to stop.
He stopped.
Rain ran off his beard.
"I'll give you three proofs," he said.
"If they fail, I walk away and you never see me again."
"The light on your third-floor landing dies in four minutes."
"The bulb has been flickering since Tuesday."
"Hattie texts you in six minutes to say the shop was out of your red, and she's bringing the white."
"And at eleven, the dog in 2B goes crazy because the pizza guy is early."
I stared at him.
"That's your proof?" I said.
"A dog?"
"It's a small thing," he said.
"Small things are the only things I can give you that aren't just stories."
"Come in out of the rain, June."
Maybe it was the way he said my name.
Zachary said it like a thing he was handing to someone else.
This man said it like he had been saying it into an empty room for years.
I let him in because it was cold, and because I had a cast-iron skillet in my kitchen box, and because I wanted to be wrong.
The hall smelled like wet carpet.
We climbed to the third floor in silence.
I stopped at my door, and the light above it flickered, and flickered, and went out.
I looked at my phone.
Four minutes.
My heart had started to pound in a way I did not like.
"Lucky guess," I said into the dark.
"Sure," Zane said.
His voice was very close, and it was not unkind.
My phone buzzed in my hand.
Hattie: ALL OUT OF YOUR RED, I'M BRINGING WHITE, DON'T BE MAD.
I read it twice.
I turned and held the screen up where he could see it, and his face was lit blue from below.
It was Zachary's jaw and Zachary's mouth.
But Zachary never looked at anything the way this man looked at me.
"Why do you look like that?" I said.
"Like what?"
"Like you're starving and I'm a bakery."
He laughed, once, short, and it hurt him a little.
"That was the nicest thing anyone has said to me in three years," he said.
I opened the door, because I did not know what else to do.
My apartment was boxes and a mattress and a lamp with no shade.
I put the portrait face-up on the one clear table, and the wet paint had run his sleeping face into a long smear.
Zane took off his coat and did not look at it for long.
"You painted the sandwich," he said.
"It was ham and pickle."
"He ate half and gave you the rest in the stairwell of Ware Hall, and you said it was the best thing you'd had all year."
I had never told anyone that.
I had never painted anyone else's hands so carefully.
"How do I die?" I said.
The words fell out before I could stop them.
Zane took a breath, and it stuck.
"Not tonight," he said.
"I'm allowed to tell you one thing a day about what happens."
"The universe is stingy, or I'm a coward."
"I haven't worked out which."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the one I have."
Downstairs, a dog started barking.
I checked the clock.
It was eleven exactly.
I sat down hard on the mattress.
The door flew open without a knock.
Hattie stood there with a bottle of white wine in one hand and her phone in the other, her red hair half out of its bun.
Her eyes went to Zane, and then to me, and then to Zane again.
"Okay, whatever this is," she said, "it will have to wait."
She held up her phone.
"Regan just posted a painting."
"It's a gray harbor with a red buoy and a little boy on a pier at four o'clock."
"June," she said, "that's yours."
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