They Left Me Out of the Family Pack Chat, So I Left Them Out of My Future novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Man Downstairs

Imogen sits on the back stairs afraid to go up, and her carpenter neighbor Quinn brings coffee and holds her cold hand steady. She tells him about the chat. Her brother Ewan pulls in at 1 a.m. with a bottle, warning she will be called a thief.

I drove home with both hands on the wheel and the radio off.

"Your mother's signature. Your name."

I heard it in my father's voice all the way down the shore road.

My mother had signed my name to a tent, and Roz had stood at that window with her phone in her hand and watched me find out.

She hadn't looked scared at all.

My phone lit up on the passenger seat half a dozen times before I reached Erie.

Dad. Mom. Dad again. Roz, with a row of heart emojis.

I didn't open any of them.

I parked behind my building, a brick house cut into three flats, and sat in the car until the engine ticked itself cold.

Then I walked around to the back stairs and sat down on the fourth step.

I couldn't make myself go up.

My mother had a spare key to my door.

She'd always had it, for emergencies, and tonight I couldn't stop wondering what she would count as one.

The stairs were new wood, still pale, with a smell of sawdust in the cold.

A door opened below me.

"You're going to freeze to that."

Quinn Teller stood in the light of his kitchen in a gray sweatshirt and old jeans, holding two mugs.

He lived on the ground floor.

In the spring he'd taken the rotted stairs off the back of the house and built these himself, one plank at a time, and he'd never sent my landlord a bill.

"I'm fine," I said.

"You've been sitting there forty minutes."

"You were counting?"

"I was building a bookshelf that I don't need, and you were in the window."

He came up the steps with his bad knee taking each one a little slower than the other.

He sat down one step below me, so his shoulder was level with my knee, and held out a mug.

It was coffee with too much sugar.

"Don't drink it if you hate it," he said.

"I hate nothing right now."

"That's concerning."

I almost laughed.

My fingers were so cold that I fumbled the handle, and the mug tipped.

His hand closed over mine and steadied it.

His palm was rough and very warm, a carpenter's palm, with a scar across the base of the thumb.

He didn't pull away right away.

Neither did I.

"You're ice," he said quietly.

"I was on a dock."

"Why were you on a dock?"

I looked down at his hand around mine, and then I looked at the dark yard.

"My family has a group chat," I said. "It's called No Imogen, No Drama."

I held out my phone and let him read the screen.

He read it for a long time, with the mug going cold in his other hand.

"Which line?" he asked.

I scrolled to it for him. "That one. My mother's pill is forty dollars. They all knew."

"And you send?"

"Six hundred. On the first of every month, for four years."

He did the sum under his breath, and I watched him get there.

"Twenty-eight thousand, eight hundred," he said.

"Plus the thirty-eight."

"Plus the thirty-eight," he said.

He handed the phone back and didn't say anything for a while.

"What do you want?" he asked. "Not what you should do. What do you want?"

I had never been asked.

"I want every dollar back," I said. "And I want them to have to say why, out loud, in front of the people they were performing for."

"Then that's the plan."

"That's a feeling."

"It's a plan if you stop sending the money and don't blink." He nodded at the phone. "You already stopped."

I had.

I hadn't known it until he said it.

My throat closed.

"I walked in without being asked," I said. "I'm not a person who does that, Quinn."

"You picked a great night to start."

I laughed, and it came out wet.

He moved up one step, so we were level, and laid his arm along the rail above my shoulder.

He didn't touch me.

I could feel exactly where he wasn't touching me, down the whole length of my back.

I had known him for a year.

He fixed my disposal and never mentioned it.

He had put a new lock on my back door in March and said the old one was bad.

I turned my head, and his face was very close.

His eyes were dark brown, and they dropped to my mouth and came back up.

"I'm not going to do anything tonight," he said. "You're in a mess, and you'll hate me for it."

"I wouldn't."

"You might tomorrow."

Headlights swept the yard.

A car turned into the lot behind the building, an old green hatchback, too fast, and stopped crooked across two spaces.

I knew that car.

It belonged to my brother.

Ewan got out in a crumpled hoodie with a bottle of wine held by the neck.

He looked up the stairs at me, and then at Quinn's arm on the rail, and his mouth opened and shut.

"Imo," he said. His voice cracked on it. "I need to talk to you before they say you stole it."

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