• Uncategorized

“He leaves them,” Eli said. His voice was quiet and deliberate, like someone reciting something they had rehearsed many times in private. “He has always done this. He leaves, and then something happens.”

“Leaves who?” I asked.

He swallowed. “You are the third one.”

The tightening in my chest was immediate and physical. My mind moved on its own toward the things Daniel had told me. His first wife — a woman I had never met and knew only through his descriptions — had died due to a medical error. A tragic, senseless loss, he had said, with the careful grief of a man still carrying the weight of it years later. His former fiancée had simply disappeared one day without warning or explanation, which he described with a specific kind of quiet hurt, as though her absence had been an abandonment rather than anything else.

I had accepted both of those stories completely. Why would I not? They were delivered with such consistency. Such practiced, convincing sorrow.

I looked around the kitchen. At the house I had moved into four months ago. The iron gate at the end of the drive. The security system on every exterior door, the passcode for which only Daniel had ever entered in front of me. The landline phone mounted beside the refrigerator.

“Tell me everything,” I said.

Eli took a slow, steadying breath. “This morning,” he said, “before you were awake, I heard him in the basement. He was talking to a man he called Mr. Grady. I listened from the top of the stairs.”

“What did they say?”