I thank her and head into the back, which is little more than a long hallway lined with storage spaces barely large enough to be called rooms. I pick my way down it, peeking into each one, finding stacks of unmarked boxes and plenty of empty take-out containers but no humans.
The last room on the left is jammed with computer parts—consoles and memory boards and semi-assembled laptops. A snake’s nest of Ethernet wires and power strips spill across the floor, leading to a stainless-steel table with, behind it, a man who looks more like a surfer dude than a techie. Shaggy hair, half-mast eyes, worn T-shirt over baggy shorts, leather and beads slung around his neck. But he’s pounding away at a keyboard, so I assume I’m in the right place.
I knock on the doorjamb, and...nothing. I try again, this time harder, and clear my throat. “Hello, Zeke?”
He glances up, but barely. “Depends.”
“Evan Sheffield sent me over. I’m Iris Griffith. He said you could help me with my phone.”
Without looking away from his screen, Zeke holds out a palm, and I’m already shaking it when I realize the gesture wasn’t meant as a greeting. “Your phone,” he says, his tone impatient.
Okay, then. I slide it out of my bag and fork it over.
He attaches it to his computer with a cord and goes to work without another word. His fingers fly across the keyboard, and a wave of nostalgia sucker punches me, slamming me with how much I miss Will. The rapid-fire clicking of the keys, the long strings of symbols and numbers rolling across the screen... I sink onto the edge of a chair against the wall.
“Somebody at Best Buy told me the number came from an app, which made it untraceable.”
Zeke snorts. “And you believed him?”
I bite down on an obviously. “Do you think you can trace it?”
“In, like, five minutes, tops.” A new text pings my phone, and he glances at the screen. “Dude’s persistent, I’ll give him that.”
I chew my lip and gaze around the room, reading senseless scribbles on a wall whiteboard, taking in the tangles of wires and chargers in a crate on the floor, trying hard to look at anything but my phone. Still. I hear my own voice say, “How many texts are there?”
Zeke stops typing. “Eighty-three.”
“Do me a favor, will you? Read me the last one.”
He gives me a strange look but swipes a finger across my iPhone screen. “It says If I could go back and start all over again, I’d do everything different but you.”
A sob tries to elbow its way up my throat, and I swallow it down, concentrating on my anger instead. Will is not dead. He’s gone by choice. He chose money over me, his supposed very favorite person on the planet. Even if he could go back, even if we could start all over again, would I want to?
But even through the anger mowing away at my insides like a swarm of hungry termites, I know the answer is yes. I shouldn’t, but I do, because I think maybe I can change things. Maybe I can make him choose me next time, instead of the money. There’s a sucker born every minute out of heartache.
After a few more minutes of ticking away at his keyboard, Zeke looks away from his monitor and to me. “There are, like, thousands of ways to stay anonymous online these days, and this dude used a flawed one.” He scribbles something onto a pad, rips off the sheet and hands it to me, along with my phone. An Atlanta address I don’t recognize.
“Seriously? That took you what, all of four minutes?”
For the first time since I walked through his door, Zeke grins, his teeth blinding me in the blue-tinted light. “That’s why they pay me the big bucks.”
*
The house is a multi-gabled monstrosity of brick and stone in Vinings, a suburb just outside the northwest perimeter of the city. There are a million houses like it here, in a million neighborhoods just like this one—newly built communities where everything matches. Carefully clipped lawns lined with winding beds of rhododendrons. Twin lanterns on either side of the front door and at least one bay window. Decorative shutters and stout mortar mailboxes down at the curb.
I putter past in my car, checking for signs of life, but as far as I can tell, there are none. The indoor lights are off, but it’s also barely dinnertime on a sunny spring day, so why wouldn’t they be? There’s also no sign of movement, no shadows sliding across the windows. If Will is in there, he’s somewhere I can’t see him.
Still. Will hiding out in this house doesn’t make any sense. If he’s got the money, why stop running in an Atlanta suburb? Why not disappear across the border, or at least into the mountains of a neighboring state? Will is too smart, and Vinings is too close to home.
I park around the corner, slip my phone in my skirt pocket and pick my way across a neighbor’s backyard on my tiptoes, trying not to sink my heels into their flawless fescue. The landscaping is as young as the house, a few years at best. What trees have been planted are still spindly and bare, providing zero coverage.
I have lost my freaking mind. An open target in broad daylight. The worst Peeping Tom in the history of Peeping Toms—in a skirt and heels, no less.
I come up to the kitchen window and press my nose to the glass. On the other side, a chair is pushed back from the table before an open laptop, its screen dark, next to a plain white mug. This morning’s coffee or a late-afternoon cup of tea? There’s no telling. Beyond, the kitchen is dark and empty.
I slink around the corner to the back door. A pair of muddy sneakers—men’s—lie abandoned next to a pile of newspapers. Whoever lives here runs and recycles, and I add two ticks to the Not Will column. Will prefers the gym, and he reads his news online. I shove my way through the shrubs and move on to the next window.
The living room is empty, too, its contents too generic to make any assumptions about the person who lives here. A couch, two chairs, a couple of tables and lamps. I look around for anything personal, photographs or books or discarded items of clothing, but there’s nothing. Other than the shoes and the laptop, this place could be a model home.
A light flips on in the hall, and my heart stops, then kicks into high gear. If it’s Will, what will I do? Faint into the bushes? Bust through the window? I grip the sill, hold my breath and wait.
Disappointment balloons in my belly, hard and heavy, at the man who walks around the corner. It’s not Will, but I recognize him immediately. Tall build and broad shoulders, skin the color of coffee beans. I saw plenty of that skin just yesterday, when he was pushing a lawn mower across my backyard.
I move the pieces in my brain, sliding them around to find where they fit. The house. Will. Corban. If this is the address attached to the blocked number, the one Will’s been using to text since he traced me to Seattle, what is Corban doing here? And where’s Will? No matter how I try to shove them together, I can’t make the pieces connect.