Chapter 19: The Tin on the Gate

The gate buzzer went at midnight, three nights after Sheldon's text.

I was awake, because my daughter was awake, and Colter was beside me in the dark with his arm over my waist.

"Don't move," he said. He reached for the camera tablet on the nightstand.

The picture was gray and grainy.

A heavy man in a windbreaker stood at the gate with something round and flat under his arm.

"It's Dennis," I said.

"Alone?"

"I think so."

Colter was already pulling on his jeans.

"You're not going out there."

"I'm going out there with you," I said. "And with the pen."

We stood together on the porch step in the cold.

Dennis did not come up the walk.

He stayed at the gate in the lamp light, and his red face had gone the color of old putty.

He had not shaved.

His windbreaker, the one with the Second Chance logo, hung open over a stained shirt.

"I'm not here," he said. "You hear me? I was never here."

"Then why are you?" I asked.

He held the thing out through the bars.

It was a round tin with painted roses on the lid, the paint chipped at the edges.

I knew it.

Carol's recipe tin.

"Take it," Dennis said.

My fingers closed on it.

It was heavier than I remembered.

Colter lifted the lid with the end of his pen.

Inside were the usual yellow recipe cards, in the usual round handwriting.

Lemon cake. Pot roast. Fun Run casserole.

Under them lay an index card, white and ruled.

At the top it said: Annabel.

Down the card, in neat rows, were twelve years of my passwords.

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