which means my mother is cooking, and even I have better skills than she does. She’s just probably going to drink vodka.
I drive back and make it home just as rain starts to fall, a late summer thunderstorm rumbling in the distance.
It matches my chaotic mood.
I enter the house and go up the stairs to my office. I can hear my mother and father discussing something in the kitchen, something I don’t want any part of, so I sneak past them.
Even though work was pissing me off earlier, I could use the distraction now. Maybe if I shove everything that just happened to the back of my mind, my subconscious can go to work on it and figure it out. Seems it can be a lot smarter than I give it credit for.
I open my laptop and see that more emails have piled up. One of them has a Word attachment I have to open, some bullshit for the HR department (seriously, again, it’s a Sunday—since when are the French workaholics?).
I open up the document, read it through, and then do a virtual signature, only it’s not working.
I have zero patience with computers. I’m always one second away from either putting my fist through it (which doesn’t work when you have a laptop) or hurling it across the room (which does work very well when you have a laptop).
Taking a deep breath to steady my patience, I decide to print out the document instead.
Of course, the printer says there is a queue, though I don’t know how that’s possible, since I don’t remember the last time I printed something out. I’m surprised I even have paper, to be honest, though I figure maybe Gabrielle refilled it for me. She might have been printing out my schedule as well.
I push the rest of the backed-up documents to print, and they start to go through the machine, feeding out blank pages first until it starts to print something. I barely have time to read it before it falls to the floor, but in that brief glance, I see something that makes my skin crawl.
No.
It can’t be.
Holding my breath, I crouch down and pick up the corner of the paper, almost afraid to look at it, for it to tell me the truth.
I flip it over.
The paper has the following words printed out on it:
There’s no place to hide. Soon the letters will end and I’ll be coming for you.
The letter that was addressed to my father was written on my computer.
But that’s not the end of it.
Another letter prints out, and I grab it before it falls.
Await my instructions or you will lose everything.
I stare at the papers in my hand, my mind grappling with the truth. I hadn’t seen that last one before. What the fuck?
What the fuck?
The third paper falls from the machine, the HR document, but it seems so foreign and trivial to me in light of all this, I let it stay on the floor.
I take the papers over to my desk and then start going through my Word files on the computer, trying to find the source of them. I don’t find it anywhere in the Word documents, but I find a few in the trash, some of them ones I haven’t seen.
Who is doing this?
But the question is futile, because even though I’d like to think my father is the one behind them, even though I wouldn’t know why, there’s only one other person who has access to my computer via password.
Just then the door to my office flies open, and I have just enough time to slip the papers in my desk and close the documents on the computer.
It’s my father, dressed in a black suit, like he’s going to a funeral even though it’s Sunday night.
“Pascal,” he says to me with a stiff smile. “I need to have a word with you.”
“Now really isn’t a good time,” I tell him, no smile in return. “And there really is such a thing as knocking.”
“Manners have to take a back seat sometimes,” he says, standing on the other side of the desk and staring down at me. “This is one of those times.”
His eyes look black, cavernous. It takes a lot to hold his eye contact these days. I know what he’s capable of, and looking into the eyes of the devil is hard when he’s your father.
“I received some letters,” he says simply, and my heart stills in my chest. I watch, unable to breathe,