Chapter 24: Three Notes Down

Darby's POV

On Saturday morning, two men on a ladder took the Abercrombie name down off the pool wall.

I sat in the bleachers with a paper cup of coffee and watched them do it.

The letters were brushed steel, each one a foot high.

They came off one at a time, with a squeal of screws, and the workers laid them in a padded crate.

W went first.

Then H, and I, and T.

Luka stood next to the ladder in his lifeguard shorts with his arms folded, checking each letter off a clipboard.

He had been told to supervise the removal.

He was taking it very seriously.

"Slower on the M," he called up. "I want that one to land in the crate."

"Sir?"

"No, I mean it. Don't drop it."

"Oh. Right."

I laughed into my coffee.

The pool was empty and bright, and the water lay flat under the high windows.

My phone buzzed on the bench.

It was a text from Willa, with a photo.

She stood behind a counter in an apron, with her hair tied back and a name tag on her chest.

Community college in January, the text said. Counseling on Tuesdays. Still here.

I wrote back, I'm glad.

Under it, a second message arrived from Bree.

She's teaching me to knit. It's going terribly. Come to dinner Sunday, I'm making pasta, nobody's allowed to bring a laptop.

I put the phone down.

On the deck, Luka had turned from the ladder and was looking at me.

He walked over, climbed the bleachers two steps at a time and sat down beside me.

"Only the B is left," he said.

"I saw."

"There's a lot of wall."

"They'll paint it."

"I was thinking of putting something there."

"What?"

He took a small key out of his pocket and held it in his palm.

It was brass, plain, with a bike-shop sticker on the head.

I looked at it.

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