Part 2

I told him they were just tired.

But deep down, I was tired of lying too.

Then Miss Hattie told me what she had seen.

A man going up to apartment 504 around one or two in the morning.

A man with a limp in his left foot and a dip in his left shoulder.

Marcus had walked like that after an old motorcycle accident.

Miss Hattie said the man had used a key.

That night, after Malik fell asleep, I opened my budget notebook. I had already paid almost fourteen thousand dollars when I counted the extra medicine money, holiday money, and grocery help Viola had asked for.

Money that could have bought Malik braces.

A safer apartment.

A car that didn’t struggle every winter.

So I called my cousin Dante.

Two days later, we sat in a coffee shop with his laptop open between us.

The security footage was black and white.

A man appeared at 1:45 a.m.

Cap low.

Mask on.

Loose jacket.

Right foot steady.

Left foot dragging.

Left shoulder dipping.

I knew that walk.

I had watched it cross our kitchen, our bedroom, our life.

The man reached apartment 504, pulled out a key, opened the door, and walked inside like he belonged there.

Dante showed me footage from the month before.

Same man.

Same hour.

Same limp.

Same key.

Always right after I delivered the envelope.

Marcus was alive.

His parents had helped him hide.

And for five years, I had been paying the people who stole my grief and turned it into income.

I didn’t scream.

The anger that came over me was colder than that.

I wanted proof.

Complete proof.

So I went back to the building with a Macy’s box and knocked on 504.

I told Elijah I had brought a foot massager for his legs. I said I wanted to come in and light a candle for Marcus.

He barely opened the door.

“Leave it here,” he said. “Your mother’s sick.”

Then I heard a cough from inside.

Not Viola’s cough.

Marcus’s.

That was the last confirmation I needed.

Dante and I began digging faster.

Within a day, he found Darius Brown, Marcus’s old best friend. Darius had cried at the funeral, then vanished. Now he was running a mechanic shop in Gary, Indiana.

In one of his photos, he wore a watch with a blue face and a scratch near the clasp.

My watch.

The one I had bought Marcus for our anniversary.

The one with our initials engraved on the back.

That night, Dante and I drove to Gary.

At 11:15, Darius arrived at a warehouse on a motorcycle. He knocked on the metal shutter in a pattern. Three taps, one tap, three taps.

Part 3

The door rose.

A man stepped into the yellow light.

Thinner.

Rougher.

Older.

But it was him.

Marcus Gaines.

Alive.

Breathing.

Standing twenty yards away from me.

I held a pen recorder near a gap in the wall and listened.

Marcus said he was leaving in a month.

His parents only needed to collect the last payment from me.

Then he laughed.

He said I paid every month like a clock.