Chapter 14: Nine Thousand Two Hundred

I didn't go to her.

I stood on the top step with the door swinging shut behind me.

"How did you find this building?"

"You're on the lab's website." She wiped her face with her sleeve. "There's a picture of you by a window."

"Go home, Kendall."

"I can't. That's the point."

She laughed, and it came out wet.

"He left me, Linds."

A couple of undergrads came out behind me and walked around us, slowly, looking.

I came down the steps so we weren't a show.

Up close, she looked terrible.

Her lash extensions were half gone.

Her nails were bitten down, and Kendall had never bitten a nail in her life.

"Two weeks ago," she said. "He said he was going to a car auction in Indianapolis."

"He took my car. He took the TV. He took the account."

"What account?"

"Our account. We opened it together in May, for the new salon. I put every tip in it for six months."

She held up her phone with a bank screen on it.

"Four thousand one hundred dollars. He took it out at a drive-through ATM at two in the morning."

The balance said eleven dollars and six cents.

"He's living with some girl from his new job," she said. "She's nineteen."

I looked at the eleven dollars and six cents.

"I'm sorry," I said.

I meant it about as much as she'd meant anything she'd said to me since ninth grade.

She heard that.

Her face changed.

The crying stopped.

"You don't have to be sorry," she said. "You have to be smart. You're good at that."

"You have a credit card, Linds. Did you know that?"

The snow was coming down harder.

"I have a debit card."

"No. You have a credit card. Platinum. Nine thousand two hundred dollars on it."

I didn't move.

"He opened it at a rest stop in New York," she said. "The morning he drove up here with the roses."

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