“Hey girl. What’s the happs?”

“What’s the happs? Seriously, Elsie? When did you get so hip?”

“Please,” Elsie answered flippantly, her headstrong tone making Clara laugh out loud. “I’ve always been hip. It was just that nobody else knew it aside from me.”

“Yeah, I could see that. Except Caleb saw it, I guess.”

“Ugh. Don’t get all sappy on me, Clara.”

“I’m not trying to!” She laughed, curling deeper into her couch and pulling her throw blanket up to practically her chin. “Believe me, I know how you feel about sappy. But still, it’s kind of true, right? He saw something in you, the same way that you saw something in him. The two of you are sort of perfect, actually.”

“I don’t know,” Elsie answered, her rising discomfort clear even over the rather spotty phone connection. “I guess so.”

“You guess so? Is that it? Is there something wrong between the two of you?”

“No! God, no. There’s honestly nothing.”

“Do you ever think that things might not work out with the two of you? Do you ever think about breaking up, maybe dating somebody else?”

“Um, hell no! There would be nobody else on the planet, I don’t think.”

“Exactly. So the two of you are perfect for each other. There’s nothing wrong with that, Elsie. You sound almost like you’re embarrassed by it, but you shouldn’t be. I’m super excited for both of you, just so you know. Just want to put that out there on the record.”

“Ha! On the record, huh? Okay, I’ll make a note. Now can we talk about why I called?”

“Um, are you sure you didn’t call to talk about this?”

“No!” Elsie shouted into the receiver, loud enough that Clara’s ear was filled with feedback, and she winced as she pulled the phone away from her head until the yelling was through. “Not at all! I called to talk about you. I’m worried about you.”

“About me? But why?”

“For several reasons, actually, but let’s start with the fact that you didn’t go to work today.”

“How on earth do you know that? Did you decide to come and work at Cubed again?! Are you like, there right now?”

“No, no. Don’t get yourself all excited. It’s nothing like that. Finnley called me. Finnley and Bradley, too, actually.”

“But why?”

“You didn’t come to work, and they were worried.”

“Why didn’t they just call me if they were worried?” Clara asked, sitting up straighter and starting to feel the faintest licks of real annoyance bubbling up inside of her. “It’s not like they don’t both have my number.”

“Yeah, I know. I think they were just worried about bothering you. They know you’ve had a weird couple of weeks.”

Elsie couldn’t see Clara, of course, but if she’d been able to see her, she would have seen her friend shaking her head with a small smile. It was funny the way life worked. She had indeed been through some very trying times, which was saying a lot for a girl with her strange, sad upbringing, but the last two weeks hadn’t actually been bad at all.

In the beginning, the day after her terrible discovery of Bo and the strange message left for her on the wall, she’d been positively sure that something was lying in wait for her around every corner. Although she’d refused Caleb’s offer for an extended stay in his loft, insisting that she was totally fine and would rather sleep in her own bed at the end of the day, those first few days after discovering the small massacre in her room had been a kind of torture. She had been sure, completely sure, that whoever had done the thing would be back and that when they were she would lose more than her cat. Each of those first days, she had waited for a call from the detectives, a call part of her knew would never come, something that would let her know who had broken in and killed her cat and why.

She waited, but that phone call never came. Those first few days bled into others, and before she knew it, a little more than two weeks had gone by. Two weeks in which every day made what had happened feel a little less real, two weeks in which every day moved closer to her version of normal. By the time those two weeks were up, Clara had a difficult time believing that anything had happened in the first place. If it hadn’t been for the absence of her feline friend, and for the very faint remains of pink from the blood of her cat on her wall, it would have really been as if nothing had happened at all. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, or shouldn’t have been, except that it made her feel a bit as if she was going crazy. To have this vague, overarching fear, a fear that hung over her almost all of the time without ever appearing to amount to anything, it felt like paranoia, and she worked hard to rid herself of it. She seemed to do a decent job of it, too, so that by the time Elsie called her, there was very little of her initial terror left. In its place was a dull ache of loss, and she figured that was something she would just have to learn to live with. Life was sort of like that, she supposed. By the time a person was old, if he or she was lucky enough to grow old, life was many things and one of those things was the accumulation of the losses and sorrows of a lifetime. It was the sum of a person’s happinesses too, but that wasn’t something people struggled to live with.

“Clara? Are you still alive over there? Do I need to come?”

“No,” Clara laughed again, a laugh that quickly turned into a cough. “I mean, yes, I’m alive. No, you don’t need to come. I’m really okay, Elsie. I just have a summer cold or something.”

“So you aren’t holed up and depressed? Like, you’re not hiding away from the world?”

“No, nothing like that. What happened was awful, one of the most awful things I’ve ever seen and hopefully that I ever will see, but I’m not going to let it ruin my life.”

“Good! That’s awesome, Clara! That’s so what I was hoping you would say, but I wasn’t sure, you know? What happened to Bo, that was disgusting. There’s no way to deny that, but I was really hoping it didn’t send you into a complete tailspin.”

“No, it didn’t. I don’t see the point in that. It would only be letting the freak that killed Bo win, and what would be the point in that?”

“Exactly. And speaking of the freak who killed your cat, any news from that awful cop?”

“Which one do you mean?”

“Which one do I mean?! Are you kidding me right now?”

“Well, I figured it paid to ask. I’m guessing you mean the fat one? Detective Andrews?”

“That’s the one. Have you heard anything? Has he called you? Given you any updates?”

“Nope, not a one.”

“What a bastard!”

“Are you really surprised? He all but told us that was what would happen. He told us that there was a very small chance that they would find anything. I don’t think that cat murders are their top priority.”

“Not just a cat murder. Somebody broke into your apartment, Clara. Not only that, but whoever did the breaking in wrote that freaky little poem on your wall. That blood never even came all of the way off, for Christ’s sake! I would think that would matter to them, at least a little bit.”

“I think they kind of thought it was my fault.”

“But that’s total bullshit! That’s the whole ‘she brought it on herself’ argument. It’s completely chauvinistic and disgusting.”

“Sure, it is, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. That guy heard that we were at a bar and decided right then and there that it was my fault. Add to that the fact that my door was unlocked and he’s totally sure it was just some guy I let into my life and shouldn’t have. He thinks I should have been more careful, and he’s probably right.”

“Right, but did he ever consider the possibility that you weren’t the one to leave the door unlocked? Did he ever consider the idea that maybe the lock was picked? Did you?”

“No, I guess I didn’t. I guess it doesn’t really matter, either. Nothing else has happened. That’s a good thing, right?”

“Of course, it is. I just don’t like the fact that he never even tried to take you seriously.”

“I guess I don’t either, but it doesn’t really bother me. There’s only one thing that really bothers me, aside from losing Bo, that is.”

“What’s that?”

“What if they’re related?”

“What do you mean? If what’s related?”

“What happened to Bo and that weird text I got. Don’t you think that would be an awfully big coincidence?”

“Right, but sometimes things really are just coincidences. You can drive yourself crazy looking for hidden meanings, hidden connections. If you really want to find them, you will. You know that. You’ve seen it with some of the people we’ve helped at Cubed. I know you must have because I did, too. Some of those people had legitimate problems for sure, even most of them, maybe. But some of them were just creating problems for themselves out of nothing. They were creating them because they got paranoid, and maybe because part of them wanted to see some kind of order where there just was none.”

“And you think that’s what I’m doing? Making up problems for myself where they don’t really exist?”

“I’m not trying to offend you, Clara, honest to God I’m not. I don’t want you to think I’m calling you crazy or anything like that. I just think you’ve been under a lot of stress and that maybe it’s getting to you. Do you think that’s even a small possibility? Nobody would blame you, least of all me.”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes, I see what you’re saying. Sure, it’s definitely a possibility. It’s probably the truth, actually. It’s not like I’ve had any other problems.”

“Really? Not any?”

“Nope. Not even one. Everything’s been just...normal. Most people would call it boring, even. Nothing out of the ordinary has happened at all, unless you count this stupid cold.”

“But that’s great!”

“Thanks,” Clara laughed, feeling almost giddy despite the cold filling her head up like cement. “I guess it is.”

“No guessing, are you kidding me? It’s totally great! If somebody was going to bother you again, there’s no way he would have waited this long to do it. It must have just been a fluke thing, you know? Like maybe some kind of weird initiation ritual, one of those weird dares guys give each other.”

“Maybe,” Clara answered thoughtfully, trying to keep the lingering doubt out of her voice. “I never thought of that. Maybe that’s part of what Detective Andrews was thinking, too.”

“That guy? No, I don’t think so. I think he was probably just being a dick, but that doesn’t mean it can’t still be true. Because I think it really could be, don’t you?”

“I do. I’m glad you thought of that. Makes a lot of sense.”

The two of them talked for a little while longer before Clara begged off the phone, saying she needed to get some rest if she was ever going to get better. That was very true, but what she actually did after hanging up couldn’t exactly be described as resting. She was too amped up to rest now, her head too full of the conversation she and Elsie had just had. The thing was, she really did see how Elsie’s suggestion was a possibility, honestly, she did. And maybe she really was starting to go a little bit off her rocker, to go a little bit crazy with paranoia and stress. Even so, she couldn’t shake the possibility that there was something more to this, that there was no coincidence. On top of that, as good of a friend as Elsie was, Clara was starting to get the feeling that she didn’t want to deal with this particular problem anymore. She probably didn’t even realize it, either. People often didn’t realize that kind of thing about themselves when it came to their friendships, especially if feeling like a good friend was something they valued. Nobody wanted to admit about themselves that it would be easier for a friend’s problem to just be over and done with, but secretly, in their heart of hearts, Clara thought that almost everyone wished for that very thing, at least every once in a while. Elsie would never say anything like that, and Clara would never bring up her suspicion, but just having it made her feel afloat, adrift from the things that usually helped tether her to the ground. If there was a pause button on life, she had a feeling somebody had pressed it on hers, that somebody had pressed pause as a not so nice joke to heighten suspense before shit really hit the fan.

These were dark thoughts indeed, the kind of thoughts Clara worked hard not to allow inside of her head, but she felt as if she had no control over them whatsoever. If it hadn’t been for an external distraction, she would quite possibly have followed those dark thoughts down a road she had no desire to visit, but fortunately, that distraction arrived just in time in the form of yet another phone call. Clara sighed and retrieved her phone from where she had tossed it beside her on the couch, half-expecting to see Elsie’s name there once again. She felt an odd jolt of surprise, which was immediately followed by an unusual unease, to see that it wasn’t Elsie calling her back at all. Instead it was Travis, who was just about the last person she expected to hear from. He had been the one to tell her not to come to work sick after all. He had completely insisted on it, in fact. His exact instructions to her had be to take a couple of days and rest, to do nothing but rest, and to sleep as much as humanly possible. With those instructions ringing in her mind clearly, she was more than a little bit hesitant to pick up the phone and see what he had to say. He wouldn’t be calling for anything good, she had no doubt about that. It was only a matter of how bad things were. She took a deep breath, hating how shaky she sounded when she let it back out again, and said hello. Five minutes later she was dragging herself to her shower with her heart thumping crazily in her chest and her head feeling even fuzzier than before.

***

“Oh man, don’t take this the wrong way, Clara, seriously, but you don’t look so hot. And I don’t mean hot like, you know, smokin’, I mean don’t look so hot like—?”

“Like she’s sick, maybe?” Finnley broke in, cutting Bradley off mercifully and throwing a protective arm around Clara’s slight shoulders. It was a good thing, too, seeing as Bradley was in the process of putting his foot in his mouth all over again. Clara’s heart went out to him, as she watched him squirm from one foot to the other. She considered telling him not to worry, but there wasn’t time for that. As it turned out, there wasn’t time for any kind of small talk.

Clara had showered as quickly as her tired, still slightly sick body would allow before hailing herself a cab. Everyone else had already been standing around nervously when she got there, as if each of them had spontaneously completely forgotten what it meant to do their jobs. Travis appeared almost immediately after Clara’s arrival, giving her the admittedly strange but hard-to-shake impression that he’d been hiding out in his office and watching for her. The moment he showed his face in front of his employees, everyone went quiet.

The only sounds were the low gasps and whistles of people truly shocked to see their boss’s haggard, cheesy white face atop a body that looked like it had lost ten pounds in less than two weeks. If Clara didn’t know him well enough to be one-hundred-percent sure that it was not the case, she would have thought he had developed a recent and completely gutting drug habit that was already laying waste to his body. When he cleared his throat, presumably to get the attention he already had from his now rapt employees, Clara thought to herself that he sounded like the one who’d been under the weather instead of her. Watching him standing there in front of them all was like watching a human train wreck, and although Clara couldn’t deny that she was afraid of the news he had to deliver, she found herself wishing that he would just go ahead and get it over with. Just deliver the punch they all knew was coming.

“Thanks guys. Thanks for being here when I asked for you. You know, on time.”

There was a low, half-hearted chorus of your welcomes before they all went silent once again. Clara could feel Bradley fidgeting on her right side, moving so quickly and sporadically that it was almost maddening, while Finnley’s arm tightened around her further. If it was possible to bottle tension and fear up and release it like a gas, this is what it would have felt like to breathe in the finished product. It was like standing in front of the guillotine and waiting for one’s neck to be placed in the slot.

“Look, I was thinking about having this be a formal thing, having you guys all crowd into the conference room so we could so this up proper, but I don’t know that I see the point. Doesn’t look like any of you are dying for that either. I’m going to tell you something hard. I want you to know that it wasn’t my decision. I know they aren’t ever in here so most of you probably forget they’re a part of the company at all, but I’ve got two silent partners, and I have to answer to them, whether I like it or not. This time, I don’t. I don’t like it at all.”

“We’re selling, aren’t we?”

It was Finnley who finally said it for him, something Clara would later think to herself must have been a mercy. It looked very much as if he’d been too overwhelmed to actually say the words, and if it hadn’t been for Finnley, he might have continued to dance around the heart of the issue for a good thirty minutes. Her question allowed him to put all of the cards out on the table, however, and he went on to explain that she was exactly right.

The decision had gone to a vote and that vote had been two to one. Cubed had finally made a legitimate name for itself, and the amount of money being offered was just too good for them to pass it up. This information was followed by a whole barrage of questions, most of which Travis seemed either hesitant or downright incapable of answering.

It didn’t really matter, not to Clara anyway. She had pretty much stopped listening as soon as she heard that the company was going to be sold. For some reason, some reason she could explain to herself and wouldn’t have dared say to anyone else, the look on Travis’s face brought her thoughts immediately back to the strange, terrible things that had happened to her two weeks ago. That text, although that seemed like a minor thing at this point. Poor Bo, which still made her feel violently sick to her stomach if she thought about it too much. When she looked at Travis’s face, she saw both of those things, too, and she couldn’t help wondering if the three things were related in some crazy way she couldn’t hope to understand. That was when she felt her phone vibrate in her old, beat-up shoulder bag, which was resting in her lap almost forgotten. Her heart might as well have stopped right then and there. It was no big thing, a phone going off, at least not in the seriously high-speed, high-tech world they were living in, but to her it felt like a harbinger of doom. She didn’t want to see what it said; she didn’t want to see who it was from, but she pulled it out regardless, as if her hand was moving independently of her brain. She saw that it was a notification for an email that had caused the buzzing, which should have made her feel a little better, but in reality, did no such thing. She opened it up, read through it once, twice, three times slowly, her eyes flitting back and forth in a way that made her look positively unhinged. She let out a low, soft moan as she read, but nobody heard her. The volume in the room had risen quickly, and there was nobody there to hear. There was only that email, that and a feeling of hopelessness accompanied by a complete certainty that this was never going to end. Whatever “this” was, which she still did not understand at all, it was never going to end, and there wasn’t a single thing she could do about it.    

A pretty girl who doesn’t listen isn’t interesting. She’s a dime a dozen. You don’t listen, you don’t see. But you will. Go to visit the elder Grant as you’ve been instructed or I’ll show you just what you’ve got to lose.