Chapter 21: Rebound

The phone buzzed on the nightstand for a long time.

I watched it until the screen went dark.

Then it lit again.

Freja turned over beside me without opening her eyes.

"Answer it," she said into the pillow.

"No."

"Nolan."

"I'm not going to."

She opened one eye.

"I'd understand," she said, in a voice she was working to keep level. "She's the person you've known longest."

"That's why."

The phone went dark and lit a third time.

I picked it up, held down the side button, and the screen said "Slide to power off."

I slid it.

Freja watched me do it.

She did not say anything, and I knew she was waiting for me to turn it back on.

I put it face down in the drawer of her nightstand and shut the drawer.

"If something is truly wrong," I said, "her sister will call yours, or Teddy's, or the police. It won't be me."

"That's cold."

"No. It's a rule." I lay back. "I'm not the one who stays up with it anymore."

She lay very still for a minute.

Then she rolled against me and put her face in my neck.

"Okay," she said.

I thought that was the end of it.

At a quarter past three someone knocked on her front door.

It was three knocks, very light, and then a pause, and three more.

Freja sat up.

"That's not the neighbors," she said.

"No."

"How would she know where I live?"

"The donor form," I said. "My address was on it. Yours is on the board directory."

I pulled on my jeans, and Freja pulled my shirt over her head, and we went down the little hallway together with the lamp off.

I put my eye to the peephole.

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