Chapter 8: Brown Street

The manager gave me the landlord's number.

I called him from the sidewalk while Ryan was still kicking the couch.

He was an older man with a slow voice, and when I told him who I was, he was quiet for a long moment.

"Miss Lowry, you signed a personal guarantee for twenty-four months on my unit."

"I've never seen your unit."

"Well," he said. "You'd better come see it."

Brown Street was three blocks from the river.

The storefront was between a vacuum repair shop and an empty lot.

Somebody had taped a sign in the window, printed on pink paper.

"KENDALL TATE STUDIO. COMING SOON!"

The door was propped open with a paint can.

Inside, the walls were half pink.

Two salon chairs still wrapped in plastic sat in the middle of the floor.

A speaker was playing the same playlist I'd made Ryan for his birthday.

Kendall was on a stepladder with a roller.

Ryan was on the floor eating a sandwich.

They'd come straight here from the moving truck.

They looked like a couple in a paint commercial.

Kendall saw me first and nearly dropped the roller.

"Are you following us?"

"I'm meeting your landlord."

Ryan stood up.

"No, you're not. Get out."

"It's his building."

The landlord came in behind me.

He was about seventy, in a windbreaker and a flat cap, with a folder of his own.

He looked at the pink walls.

He looked at the plastic-wrapped chairs.

Then he looked at me.

"You're Lindsay Lowry?"

"Yes, sir."

He opened his folder.

"Then who," he said, "did I meet in March?"

He turned the page around so we could all see it.

The guarantee. My name, typed. That same round signature with the big J.

And stapled to the back, a copy of a driver's license.

My license.

The photo from when I was eighteen, with my hair in a braid.

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