Quitting this Family after Being Abandoned for Laughs novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Only Lit Place for Miles

At a highway gas station Tara learns there was no maintenance notice and pulls a log that shows Colin shut the tower down himself.

I walked until the sky turned gray.

The field ended at a ditch, the ditch ended at a gravel road, and the gravel road ended at a highway with one lit building on it.

It was a gas station with a buzzing sign and a clerk asleep behind the register.

I knocked on the glass. He jerked awake and looked at my torn sleeve, my shoes, the stick still in my hand.

"My phone died," I said. "Can I charge it? I'll buy anything you want."

He pointed at an outlet behind the coffee machine and went back to his chair.

I bought a hot chocolate with the last bills in my coat and sat on the floor with the phone on its cord.

My knees shook for the first time since midnight.

It was not fear. It was only that I had stopped walking.

The phone came back to life with a long run of buzzes.

My sister had texted at 12:01. Time's up! No call! Colin wins, Mom owes him fifty bucks!

At 12:03 she had sent a crying-laughing face six times.

My mother had written: Tara, sweetheart, don't be sulky tomorrow. It was only a joke.

My father had written nothing.

Colin had written one line at 12:20. Phone back on yet? Call me when you're home safe, I'll bring coffee.

That was all.

No sorry, and no question about where I had slept.

I read his message three times and felt nothing, which surprised me.

Behind the register the clerk's phone lit up with a news alert, and he picked it up without looking.

His bars were full.

"Does your phone get signal out here?" I asked.

"Always has," he said. "It's the highway tower."

"Not the one by the old farm road?"

He shrugged. "Never drops out there. Odd, a phone dying on that road. Don't walk it at night anyway."

I thanked him and opened my work laptop from my bag.

I design carrier networks for a living, and the one thing a night in the dark had left me was a clear head.

My company leases bandwidth on half the towers in the county, so I can see the shared status board that every carrier on those towers can see.

I logged in and pulled up the sector that covered the field.

A green bar and a red bar sat side by side.

The red bar was a block of dead hours, and it started at midnight.

Under it was the entry I wanted: the ticket for planned maintenance.

I searched for the date. I searched the week.

Nothing.

No notice had been filed. No work order had been opened. No technician had been dispatched.

My fiancé had said at the table that his assistant had sent a notice that afternoon.

There was no notice, because nobody had sent one.

I scrolled to the raw event log.

The line I needed sat near the bottom, in plain gray text:

Sector 4 administrative lock, scheduled for 00:00, entered 23:31 by user: c.ashby.

I knew that login. It was Colin's own, the one he used when he showed me his toys at dinner and said nobody else ever touched it.

At 11:31 he had been sitting at my parents' table with a glass in his hand.

My phone had been in my hand, still connected, still recording.

He had keyed in the lock on his own phone and laughed while he did it.

I took three screenshots and mailed them to a private address that only I could open.

Then I saved the log to a drive in my bag, and a second copy to the cloud.

The clerk watched me for a moment, then slid a banana across the counter.

"On the house," he said. "You look like you're about to walk into a fight."

"I'm about to walk into a lot of them," I said.

I ordered a car on the app, which worked, because the highway tower belonged to a different company.

While I waited I wrote a new text to Colin, deleted it, and wrote another.

Home safe, I typed. Bring the coffee.

I read it over once and sent it.

He answered almost at once, with a heart and a row of tiny coffee cups.

I looked at the log again, at his login, at the time.

He had never been waiting to see if I would call.

He had made sure I couldn't, and then he had lied to everyone at that table about who did it.

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