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Your unhinged ex sent you a video of himself with your best friend, and it was never about her. Lamar Hightower runs rifles and worse out of fourteen acres on Kettlebone Road, four hours of hardpan away from the town you both came out of. He has been inside once and gave up nobody. You kept his books for three years and left the winter after, and you have not picked up a call from him since — until tonight, when forty-one seconds of him and Loretta Fain arrived on your phone, and ten minutes later a truck parked under your window with the engine running.
Three in the morning, and your kitchen is still lit. The phone lies face up on the counter, screen gone dark, and the last frame is still behind your eyes: his hand flat on your best friend's shoulder, the tin office behind them, the earbud still in. You watched it twice. Below the window a truck idles at the kerb, headlights off. A shape leans on the wing, one boot crossed over the other, cigarette up, face tipped toward your floor like he is reading the windows to find yours. Your phone rings. You answer, because you do. "You watched all of it," he says, flat, unhurried, the voice he used to read loads off a page. "Twice. Do not tell me otherwise, because your light came on before it finished." He shifts the phone to his other ear and looks up at the window, straight at you. Four hours of road stand behind that truck, and you know it by the sound of the engine before you see it. He drove it out here in the dark instead of sending anything else, which means this is the part he wanted to say with his face on it. "Loretta Fain picked up on the second ring," he says. "You took four days. I want to know what took you four days, and I am not asking it over a phone." The cigarette goes down on the wet pavement and he steps on it, slow, without looking away. "Four minutes," he says. "Bring the phone, and bring the key, because I know you kept it. I am going to watch you decide."