This half hour is hers. Then to bed on the pullout sofa, then work, then a few precious hours with Ali, then bedtime. And then she does the whole thing over again.
She has just taken her first bite when there’s a sound out in the hall. Redford going to his rooms, she assumes, so she chews and swallows on her right side (she has a bad tooth on the left, is still saving to get it pulled), then takes another bite. But the footsteps stop outside her door, then creak. Violet pauses her show, annoyed, and waits for the knock. “Sally?” she calls.
There’s another creak. Then more steps, this time moving in the direction of the stairs, and then Violet doesn’t hear anything anymore.
She rises, uneasy, and sets her plate back down on the coffee table. At the door, she looks through the peephole. Sees nothing. She presses her ear to the door. Nothing.
She thinks about messaging Sally downstairs, but Sally’s the nervous type, and Violet doesn’t want to rile her up over nothing.
So she returns to the door, loops the chain in the slide, and turns the three locks. Opens it. Quick look to make sure no one is hiding to the door’s left or right, or crouched down below the view of the peephole. Then she closes the door, unhooks the chain, and opens it wide enough to stick her entire head out.
The hall is empty. But there’s something on the floor.
An envelope, folded from creamy paper, and—again—one word in a hand she recognizes: Violet.
Not Sally’s hand, though.
Her heart starts thumping hard. She looks out into the hall again, walks to the top of the stairs, peers down. Then back to her room. The apartment is on the house’s back half—none of the windows faces the front door—but Violet looks out the window anyway, and she sees nothing there, either, no dark figure moving away in the night.
Hand trembling, she slides a finger under the envelope’s seal. There’s a sheet of paper, and Violet unfolds it.
Violet,
I think about you all the time. I hope you found what you were looking for over here. I am still on the hunt myself. I have a debt to collect. Another visit to pay.
I think all the time about the Salt, too. Why it cost us our babies. And the conclusion I reached was that we don’t deserve to be here. We’re not supposed to be here. And if the ticks don’t finish the job, the cure will. But I’m glad you got your baby, Violet. I hope to meet her. It gets me through a day to imagine it.
Love,
June
From the bedroom, Ali cries out. Normally, this would be cause in Violet for exhausted resignation, even despair, but tonight she goes to her daughter gladly, grateful for the excuse to snuggle her close. Maybe Violet will just sit in the rocking chair, hold her all night long. There will be no sleep for her now, anyway. She can only rock and hold her child and think about her mother—the woman who stood silently outside Violet’s own door, then chose to pass over it.