Daphne calls me while I’m sitting at the Green Bean, the campus coffee shop, eating a croissant and staring at my phone.
“Hey, baby girl,” I answer, sounding more chipper than I feel.
“Hi, McFly. I called to ask you what time you’ll be ready to hop into the DeLorean and leave tomorrow. I was hoping we could go at 2:30. I took the day off from work.”
“Okay,” I agree immediately. “What do I wear on this adventure?”
“Khaki pants, button-down shirt,” she says.
“Noted. What do you want for dinner tonight? Your mom sent home some chicken. I thought I’d make tortilla soup.”
Ding. My phone alerts me to a new email. And now I can’t even concentrate on the conversation.
“That sounds great,” Daphne is saying. “What can I make on the side?”
I fail to answer her, because I’m already holding the phone away from my ear, already reading Paul’s words.
“Rickie?” she prompts.
“Uh, sorry gorgeous. I’d better go.”
“Is everything okay?” she asks, her voice worried.
And that’s when I make a terrible error. I don’t tell her about this crazy conversation I’ve been having. And I don’t tell her why.
“Yeah. See you at home,” is all I say. Then I end the call and read Paul’s message three times in quick succession.
Rick—
I really can’t talk about this. But maybe if you have access to a university library, you should know that Court Martial summaries are sort of public. They’re printed in a legal journal called Military Justice Review. When shit goes really bad at a military academy, sometimes personnel are CMed. You can read bare bones summaries of these motions in the logs.
But look—if you find this thing—there’s two guys mentioned, right? You might wonder which one you are. Please know that I was the target. It was me. And you got hurt trying to stop it.
By the way: we were friends. Absolutely. It makes me sad to hear you’re not sure about that. I was lucky to call you my friend.
That’s all I have for you. Maybe someday I’ll be able to call you and say all the words out loud. Maybe I will be fearless, and say what needs saying.
But today is not that day. Not yet.
—P
I get up from the coffee shop and hightail it toward the library.
Thirty-Nine
Daphne
Rickie is acting strangely, and it's stressing me out.
Yesterday he’d said he wanted to make dinner. But then he didn’t. I waited for him for two hours before texting to ask, Where are you?
Sorry! Library. I’ll be home late.
So I’d made myself a bean quesadilla, with a side of disappointment. Then I fell asleep in his bed at midnight. He came in so late I didn’t even hear him.
I mean, sure, he tried to make it up to me in the morning. I woke up to his urgent mouth on my nipple. Things escalated quickly from there, and I ended up on all fours, gripping the headboard, with Rick’s hand clasped over my mouth so I wouldn’t wake up the entire house with my moaning.
It had been a very effective distraction technique. Reduced to a whimpering heap of sexual satisfaction, I’d failed to inquire about his distant behavior the day before.
Now he’s right beside me in the old Volvo, driving me to Connecticut. Sitting here in the passenger seat as we cruise down 91 should feel like a big déjà vu for me.
But it doesn’t, because Rickie is so quiet. “There’s something wrong, isn’t there? You haven’t said a word for twenty miles.”
“No, baby,” he says, his voice scratchy from disuse. “I’m fine.”
Feeling unsettled, I close my eyes and try to fight off a horrible sense of foreboding. I don’t take naturally to performing spy maneuvers at my former place of work. Just the thought of breaking into an office to peek inside a file folder has my good girl complex pinging like crazy.
Maybe I’m the only one who’s acting strangely.
But then I glance at Rickie, and see a worry wrinkle across his forehead that isn’t usually there. He’s keeping something to himself. I’m sure of it. “I swear, Rickie, I had a better sense of what was in your head that first time we rode together. When we were strangers.”
This comes out of my mouth sounding very bitchy. And I expect him to call me on it.
But he doesn’t. “Strangers are just friends you haven't met yet," he murmurs. “They taught me that at Sunday school once. Then I lost my memory. And I learned that strangers could also be people you