He Sent a Proxy Groom, So I Walked Away Forever novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: What Cal Kept

The boat shop in Wayzata smelled like cedar and varnish, and the light over the loft stairs was on.

I stood at the bottom with my car keys in my fist.

Cal came to the top of the stairs wiping his hands on a rag.

"You came," he said.

"Your number was on the picture you forwarded me."

"That's one way to say yes."

"Gwendolyn told me to ask you what you did seven years ago," I said. "So I'm asking."

He didn't make me stand there.

"Come up," he said. "It's a mess."

It was one room over the shop floor, with a mattress in the corner and a workbench along the wall.

He pulled a metal tool chest from under the bench, dug through it, and set an old phone on the table in front of me.

The screen had a crack across one corner.

"I kept it," he said. "I don't know why. I turned it off the day I left and never looked at it again."

He plugged it in and waited for it to wake.

When it lit, he thumbed through to a message and handed the phone across.

It was from my number.

It said: "Don't come back. I'm with Brooks. Please just let me go."

I read it twice.

The text was dated seven years ago, on the afternoon of the day my mother's scan came back.

"I never sent that," I said.

Cal didn't move.

"It's my number," I said. "But that day I sat in a hospital hallway holding a cup of water for a woman who couldn't swallow it. I never typed this."

Cal thumbed back to the call log and turned the screen toward me.

A dozen missed calls, every one from me, stacked under the text.

"I never saw those," he said.

"A dozen," I said.

"I called you once. A week after, from a borrowed phone outside Duluth." He held up one finger. "Brooks picked up and said you didn't want to talk to me."

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