I do not need it. The number is cancelled. I have told Margit I will bring it back to the service so somebody else can use it, and I have not, and she has stopped asking.
Some nights I take the tile off and look at it.
Four unread messages is what it said, on the floor of that bathroom, at about eleven on a Saturday night in August. Four people, three of whom were paid to be there and one of whom had every reason in the world not to be.
And all four of them had written to me before anything happened that night. Before the dinner. Before the crab. They were already waiting.
**That is the thing I keep in the tile. Not the phone. The fact that it was already full.
Cressida lives about an hour away and we have lunch once a month. We did not intend to be friends. We are not, exactly. We are the only two people on earth who know a particular thing, and it turns out that is its own category.
And the kit itself, which I have never opened, and which I was asked about by a journalist in the summer.
