His Letters Reached Me Fourteen Years Late, and the First Said Goodbye novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: The Third Week

The murder trial in Courtroom 504 went into its second day, and I typed all of it.

A man in a gray suit had killed his business partner in a parking garage, and twelve strangers had to hear it told three ways.

I sat in my chair below the bench with my hands on the keys.

I heard every word, as I always do, and for the first time in nine years I heard it from a long way off.

The bailiff stopped at my station at the lunch recess.

"You look different," she said. "Somebody finally take you to dinner?"

"Somebody cooked me eggs once," I said. "He burned the toast."

She laughed, and went to the break room with her coffee, and I looked down at my phone.

There was a text from Alister.

Lunch break? Tell me one thing that happened.

I typed back: A juror cried at the photographs. Nobody saw but me and the judge.

Three dots, then: Are you all right?

I'm the machine in the corner, I wrote. The machine is fine.

You're not a machine, he sent. Call me tonight. I want to hear your voice.

I put the phone face down on the steno desk and kept my hand on it.

The call came at ten, and I took it in bed.

My apartment was the third floor of a brick walk-up on Damen Avenue.

It had a radiator that knocked and a window that looked at somebody else's window.

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