Keep This Quiet: The fifth time in forty years

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Yes, Save My Spot!

Tuesday. The annex, ten past midnight.

The dark had a temperature, and it was falling.

She stood with her back to the oak, the phone's light on the floor, and did the inventory, because the inventory was hers. Two gable windows, black. Rafters. Shelves of cartons in a dead man's hand. A desk, a machine, a chair. One door, with her on the wrong side of it.

The phone had a third of its charge. She held it in her palm and looked at the one name she could have called.

He would answer. His phone lived face down on the nightstand, and he woke like a man who had never once been surprised. He would come across the lawn in his coat with the gray key off the ninth hook, climb the swept stairs, and let her out. Then she would have to explain, at one in the morning, what his wife was doing in a locked room with her letter on a carton. Whatever she said would go somewhere and be written down.

Or he would not answer. Then she would have learned something about where he was.

She put the phone in her pocket without pressing anything. That was the night's whole arithmetic. She did it once.

She sat in the chair because the floor was colder. The leather took her warmth slowly and gave none back. She had come out in a cardigan; the coat hung on its hook by a side door a hundred yards away, keeping her file.

At one the cold found her hands. At half past it found her teeth.

At two the line under the door went yellow.

She was on her feet before she knew it. Light from the landing, up the last flight, laid in a thin bar along the sill of the oak.

A tread on the stair.

It came up slowly. She counted it, because counting was hers: the flight to the landing, the turn, the last flight. The tread took each board at a weight the boards reported, because the boards had no reason to keep this one's secret. It stopped on the far side of the door.

She stood a yard from it in the dark with her hand over her own mouth.