Chapter 20: Thursday Nights

Sadie's POV

I parked the clinic truck across the street from the VanHorne house, under a streetlight, with the engine off.

Flynn had gone in forty minutes ago with a set of keys and two flattened cardboard boxes.

He had not looked back at me from the porch.

That was fine, and it was also not fine, and I sat with both.

I knew that house.

For two years I had known exactly how far it was from my back door to its front gate.

Every Thursday, at the end of the night, he put the last empty cat dish in my recycling bin and thanked me for the tea.

He checked his watch, and his shoulders came up, and he drove away.

I stood at my upstairs window and watched his taillights go down Dillard Street until I couldn't see them.

I had never told him.

Now I was watching those same lights burn in the same house, and he was in there alone, in the rooms where his son had lived.

A light came on in a window on the second floor.

It was a small window, with a blue curtain and a row of stickers on the glass.

I looked at it for a long time.

The front door opened at last, and he came down the steps with a box in his arms.

He put it in the bed of the truck and went back for another.

He did not hurry.

When he was done, he stood by the passenger door and looked at the house.

I got out and came around the hood.

"Is she there?" I asked.

"No. She left the keys under the mat, and a note on the table."

"What did it say?"

"I didn't read it."

"Good."

He looked at me then.

There was dust on his shirt and a smear of something blue on his jaw.

Keep reading free with an account. Start She Trusted a Fake Lie Detector, So I Left Her the Truth from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.