Chapter 20: Shredded

By midnight Rachel had used two rolls of Scotch tape, one Band-Aid, and every bad word she knew in English and the six she knew in Spanish from Mrs. Ruiz.

She was on her knees on the rug in Julian’s study, the same navy-and-rust rug she’d fallen apart on, with the three bags from the garage dumped out in front of her in a pile that looked like a hamster’s bedding. Cross-cut strips, a quarter inch wide, two inches long. Thousands of them.

Before she’d opened anything, she’d done what Kessler told her in the car. She photographed the three bags sealed, on the rug, from every side, the box with his Sharpie on it next to them. Then she cut each bag open with Mrs. Ruiz’s kitchen scissors and photographed them again. If Whitfield wanted to call this trash in front of a judge, it was going to be very well documented trash.

She’d started by color. That was the trick, she figured out around nine. Most of it was white printer paper, useless, Michael’s old emails and Con Ed bills and a menu from the Thai place. She swept those into a laundry basket. But some strips had a faint blue tint to the stock, and some had that thin navy band along one edge, and a few had the gold. Those she laid out in rows on a sheet of poster board she’d stolen from Mrs. Ruiz’s pantry stash for her grandkids’ science projects.

Two hours in, she had eleven strips that touched.

Her knees hurt, and her new manicure, Tessa’s soft squares in Ballet Slipper, already had tape gunk under every nail. She didn’t stop.

At ten past one the door opened.

Julian stood there in the gray T-shirt again and the reading glasses he’d forgotten to take off. He looked at the floor, the poster board, the laundry basket, and then her.

“Mrs. Ruiz said you skipped dinner,” he said.

“Mrs. Ruiz is a snitch.”

“She is. I pay her extra for it.” He didn’t come in. “What is all this?”

“Michael’s trash.” She held up a strip with a sliver of gold. “His lawyer swore it was utility bills. Nobody’s lawyer sweats like that over Con Ed.”

He looked at the strip for a long second. Then he came into the room, closed the door behind him with his heel, and lowered himself onto the rug beside her. Beside her, not across. Close enough that their shoulders touched.

He picked up a handful of strips from the pile.

“Blue tint on the left,” Rachel said, after a second. “White’s garbage. Navy edge goes on the board, gold gets its own row. Don’t lose the gold.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Don’t ma’am me. I’m thirty-two.”

“Yes, Rachel.”

* * *

They worked. That was the thing she’d remember later, more than anything that happened after. They just worked.

He was fast and terrible at it. He kept trying to match strips by the words on them, which was smart in theory, except the strips were too thin to hold a whole word, so he kept getting excited about half an E. She was slow and good. She went by the faint gray printer streak that ran down every page from that particular machine, a flaw she’d noticed by midnight, and she lined it up strip by strip like stitches.

“How did you see that?” he said, around two.

“I look at things for a living. I find the one hair on your bathroom tile.”

“You do.”

“Plus I was going to be an accountant.” She tore off a piece of tape with her teeth. “Westchester Community College. Two semesters. I was good. Mr. Abernathy, Intermediate Financial, wrote on my final that I had the eye for it. Underlined eye twice.” She shrugged, and her shoulder moved against his. “Then Michael got his first real job and the rent went up and somebody had to work full-time, and it obviously wasn’t going to be the guy with the future.”

Julian let that sit for a minute.

“I started my first company in a dorm room at Stony Brook,” he said. “With a stolen router and a mini fridge full of Red Bull. Network security for small businesses. Mostly dentists.”

“Dentists?”

“Dentists get hacked a lot. Nobody believes that.” He laid down a strip. Wrong one. She moved it without comment. “My mother thought I was dealing drugs. All those dentists calling the dorm phone at two in the morning.”

Rachel laughed so hard her forehead ended up on her knee.

“She’d have liked you,” he said.

It was such a small thing to say. He said it to the poster board, not to her. It sat in her chest anyway, warm and heavy, and she didn’t look at him, because if she looked at him she was going to do something about it, and they were sitting in Michael’s garbage.

“What did you call it?” Rachel said instead. “The dentist company.”

“I called it CrossCheck.”

“Oh, that’s terrible.”

“I was nineteen.”

“That’s a hockey penalty, Julian.”

“I’m aware of that now.”

By four, his knee was pressed against hers. By five, she’d stopped noticing where she ended and he started on that rug, just one long warm line of contact from shoulder to hip. Neither of them moved it. Neither of them mentioned it. They passed tape back and forth like surgeons.

Outside the big study window, the park went from black to charcoal to a wet early gray.

* * *

At ten to six Rachel smoothed down the last strip, pressed the tape flat with her thumbnail, and sat back on her heels.

Half a page. Ragged on the right side where the strips just ran out, holes like moth bites all through the middle. But a page.

A bank statement. The crest at the top, navy and gold, a little shield with something like a ship on it. The bank’s name was gone except for a few letters at the edge she couldn’t make sense of. A table of dates and numbers, most of the numbers missing. An account number with all but the last four digits printed as asterisks.

********4471.

And above it, in the account holder field, the strips didn’t quite meet. A gap where a whole strip had gone missing, maybe still in the bags, maybe in a landfill in Peekskill. On the left side of the gap, a cluster of capitals in bold.

Julian leaned in over her shoulder. She could feel his breath on her neck. He’d stopped breathing, almost. So had she.

The surviving letters read RM CONSUL. Rachel stared at them.

R. M.

Two initials she’d written on the inside cover of every textbook she ever owned. On her lunch bag in second grade. On the back of her mother’s photographs in pencil, in a box in Michael’s garage.

Rachel Moore.

The box in the garage had said RACHEL in Michael’s Sharpie, and she’d thought it meant her mother’s pictures. It hadn’t. Michael had labeled it right. Everything in that box was hers.

Including this.