Chapter 4: The Number On The Tag

"This is what you ran out on us for?"

Steve held the box open under his nose and laughed, a short, sharp sound that made a woman at the bus stop turn to stare. "A dead man's watch and a rusty key. Vanessa, you wasted your time."

I stood on the pavement outside the hotel with the suitcase handle cutting into my palm, and I couldn't make myself speak. People were watching, and my face was burning, and the worst part was that he sounded so relaxed, as if he had already won.

"Maybe the tag means something," Vanessa said, tilting her head toward the box in his hands.

"It's a phone number. Walsh and Associates." He flicked the paper tag with one finger. "Some old man's lawyer, probably dead too. Here, Jenna, take your treasure."

He tossed the box at my feet. It hit the concrete and the lid sprang open, and my grandfather's watch skidded across the pavement, its glass cracked straight across the face. I dropped to my knees and scooped it up with both hands, and something rose in my throat that I couldn't swallow. That watch had been on his wrist every Sunday of my childhood.

"Come home when you get hungry," Steve said from above me. "I'll even forget about the video. Don't make me wait too long."

He got into the passenger seat, and I heard the car door slam. Vanessa lingered a moment longer than she needed to, and as she turned away I caught the glow of her phone screen at her hip. It showed a photograph of the paper tag, every number sharp and clear, and she must have taken it while Steve was busy laughing. She saw me looking and gave me a small smile before she slid behind the wheel.

Then they drove away, and I was alone on a sidewalk with a suitcase, a broken watch, and forty-one dollars.

For a while I just knelt there. I told myself I should be angry, and I was, but underneath the anger something heavier was pressing down on me. I had come back to fix my life, and in a single day I had lost my phone, my cards, my home, and a little boy who still thought I was his mother. My eyes stung, and I wiped them with the back of my hand before anyone could see.

"Excuse me, ma'am?" The hotel clerk had come out of the lobby, the same young woman who had declined my cards, and she looked genuinely sorry. "I saw what happened. Please, come in and use our phone. No charge."

"Thank you," I said, and my voice cracked on it.

I stood at the front desk and dialed the only number I knew by heart. Maya had never changed hers since we were fifteen, and I had never been able to forget it, even through years of barely calling. It rang three times, and then a familiar, slightly out-of-breath voice answered.

"Hello?"

"Maya," I said. "It's me."

There was a short silence. "Jenna?" Her voice changed completely. "Where are you? What's wrong? I can hear it in your voice."

"I'm at the Station Inn," I said. "I... I don't have anywhere to go."

"Don't move," she said. "I'm coming right now."

She arrived twenty minutes later in her hospital scrubs, her car door hanging open behind her, and she stopped dead when she saw my face. Maya was my oldest friend, the girl from two doors down who had shared her lunch with me every day in grade school, and the only person who had begged me not to marry Steve. She was an emergency room nurse now, and I had pushed her away for years because Linda couldn't stand her. She didn't say a word about any of it. She walked straight over and wrapped both arms around me.

"Who did this?" she asked quietly, her fingers hovering over the bruise.

"Steve."

Her whole body went rigid. "I'm going to kill him."

"Maya, please..."

"I'm not joking. I will do it and I'll look completely calm while I'm doing it." She pulled back and held my shoulders, and her eyes were wet. "Get in the car."

I cried the whole way to her apartment, not loudly, just endless tears sliding down my face while she drove with one hand and held mine with the other. When I finally managed to speak, it came out in pieces. "I'm leaving him, Maya. I'm really leaving him this time."

"I've been waiting eight years for you to say that," she said, and her voice shook. "I was so scared you never would."

"I'm so sorry I stopped calling. I'm sorry I let her tell me who my friends could be."

"Shut up, you idiot," she said, laughing and crying at once. "You're here now. That's all that matters."

Her apartment was small and warm and smelled of coffee, and the couch had a blanket folded on one end. She fed me soup and made me drink tea, and when I tried to refuse the five hundred dollars she pressed into my hand, she slid it into my coat pocket anyway and told me we would argue about it later. I didn't tell her I had died. I didn't tell her about the ash, or the volcano, or the sixty days. All I told her was that I needed a lawyer, and she nodded and asked no questions, because she was Maya.

That night, I lay on her couch and held the brass key up to the lamp. The faded tag read Walsh & Associates, with a phone number below it, and I remembered my grandfather's voice. He had pressed this key into my palm the winter before he died. "If anything happens to me, Jenny, you call Walsh. Nobody else. Just Walsh."

I had forgotten it for years, and Steve had made sure of that, always laughing whenever the old quarry came up.

I opened my laptop to back up the video, and my stomach dropped. A new email sat at the top of my inbox, from an address made of random numbers, sent less than an hour ago. There was no text, only an attachment of the paper tag, and below it a single line.

Walsh & Associates opens at nine. Let's see who gets there first.

At the bottom, there was a tiny red heart, the same little heart I had seen beside Vanessa's name on Steve's phone.