Chapter 12: The Note Folded Beneath the Phone
Abigail waited until the house had gone quiet before she brought me the phone.
It was not hers. I knew that before she set it on the kitchen table because of the cracked green case and the strip of silver tape across its back. I had seen it once before, lying near the sink after the party, and had assumed it belonged to someone who had forgotten it. Abigail had not touched it then. At least, that was what her stillness had made me believe.
Now she placed it beside my hand and kept her fingers on the edge of the table.
The screen was dark. A red notification light blinked once, then disappeared.
I looked at her. She looked at the phone.
That was all.
She went to the counter and took a folded sheet of notebook paper from beneath the dish towel. The fold had been pressed flat several times. When she gave it to me, her hand shook once, barely enough to move the paper.
I opened it without asking her to explain.
The writing filled only half the page.
I did not take the tablet. I put the phone in my bag because he said he would tell them I stole it. The message was sent from my account, but I did not send it. The tablet was already broken when I got there.
I read it twice.
The first sentence explained the contradiction that had followed us for days: the device listed under my name, the account activity that had appeared while Abigail was supposedly somewhere else, the phone that had turned up in our kitchen. She had not been hiding a missing object from me. She had been carrying evidence she was afraid to leave behind.
The second sentence made the room feel smaller.
I turned the paper over. The back was blank.
Abigail watched my face, waiting for the question she had decided she could not answer.
I set the note beside the phone instead.
Then I opened the phone.
There was no passcode. The message thread was still on the screen, frozen beneath a number with no name. I did not read every line. I stopped at the first message that mentioned the tablet and the second that used Abigail's account. The words were plain, not threatening in the way movies made threats sound. They were worse for being ordinary. Bring it back. Say you had it. Don't make this harder.
A video file sat beneath the messages.
I did not open it.
Abigail's shoulders tightened when my thumb hovered over the screen. I moved my hand away. The choice belonged to her, even if the phone had already carried itself into our house.
I took photographs of the messages with my own phone, including the number, the timestamps, and the battery percentage. Then I placed both devices in a clean envelope from the desk drawer. The paper note went in last.
That action had a cost I could feel before I made it. The school office had asked me to bring the tablet record in the morning. If I handed over the phone, Abigail's account, and the messages, I would be placing her name inside an investigation that could not be controlled afterward. If I kept them, the school could say I was still concealing evidence.
I wrote down the time on the envelope: 11:48 p.m.
Abigail moved toward the hallway, then stopped. Her face had gone pale again. She touched the pocket of her sweatshirt.
I understood the missing piece then. The phone was not the only thing she had carried home.
I did not reach for her. I only slid the envelope farther from the edge of the table and stood between it and the front door.
She looked at the locked door, then at the dark window beside it.
May you like
The phone lit again inside the envelope.
A new message had arrived.
