Chapter 14: The Drawer

I went to Greystone Labs alone.

Caleb stood beside me while a woman in blue gloves sealed my swab in a tube.

He watched her put the label on.

She carried it to a steel door, and he followed and read the number off the tube himself.

"Rush," he told her. "Tonight."

"Tonight costs triple, Mr. Langston."

"I know what it costs."

Outside, the wind had turned cold.

He leaned on his car with his hands in his hoodie and did not look at me.

"I'll call you," he said.

"Caleb."

"Don't. Not yet."

He called at ten past six that evening.

I answered in the stairwell on Fourth Street with Polly's shoes in my other hand.

"Same," he said.

His voice was flat.

"I asked her this afternoon," he said. "She cried. She said you paid the lab."

"And?"

"I believed her for ten minutes."

"What happened at ten minutes?"

"She never asked me which lab."

I closed my eyes.

"I'm not ready for you," he said. "I'll be ready. I don't know when."

"I know."

"I'm still her brother."

"I know that too."

He hung up.

My mother was waiting at the foot of my stairs with her handbag over her arm.

She had come to take Polly to the big house for one night.

She had already packed a bag with Stripes in it.

Polly went down the steps holding her grandmother's finger and did not look back.

I stood in my empty kitchen at seven o'clock.

My phone lit.

I am not coming to you. Your rules. But I have something to show you, and I want to put it in your hands myself. Douglas.

I read it three times.

Then I put on my coat.

His house was a dark brick building at the end of a quiet road, with one light on in the hall.

He opened the door before I knocked.

"You're not supposed to be here," he said.

"Saturdays, a park, witnesses," I said. "It's Thursday. I'm breaking my own rule."

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