Night Work

“So, Mr. Dillard,” said Kayla, breaking the silence in the van, “how did you get into this business?”

I’d heard that tone before, that guarded politeness overlaying deep skepticism. I’ve never blamed anyone for doubting me. It’s only human nature, after all, to shrink from that which we cannot understand. Adjusting my briefcase on my lap, I smiled. “I’m afraid it’s quite a long story, and very strange.”

“Well,” she said, “I can imagine that. But tonight is going to be strange anyway.”

That it would be. In fact, it was strange enough already. Here I was—a suit-wearing man with a briefcase—seated in a battered old white van driven by the twenty-two-year-old wunderkind of Wextec Trading Corp.

Every enterprise, large or small, is sustained by the hidden labors of at least one overworked, underpaid woman who does everything, and I could tell that at Wextec, Kayla O’Halloran was that woman. She scheduled, she emailed, she organized, she signed bills of lading, and she drove the company’s ancient van, from the speakers of which she blasted Chappell Roan and Hozier. Nothing, however small, escaped the clutches of her calloused hands. At least three dozen keys jangled from the carabiner on her belt loop.

Her boss, a doughy man named Howard, had received me at their tiny Midtown office an hour and a half before with the kind of sweaty furtiveness one would normally expect of a liquor-store thief or a public masturbator. He didn’t have much to say to me. After we sat down in the conference room—a cramped, water-stained dump that in Texas would have served as a coat closet—he looked me up and down and handed me a contract. The terms had already been hashed out over email, so all I did was give it a glance. “Well,” he said, watching me as I read, “think you can do it?”

“Well, yes, of course,” I said. “I’d just like to make sure it’s the right move for you. After all, these cases aren’t exactly common. Are you sure you don’t just have an intruder? Have you had the police come take a look?”

Howard shook his head. “My guys didn’t see a thief,” he said. “We did inventory after the incidents, and nothing was missing. Besides, who would steal a bunch of discount T-shirts? There’s just no way.”

“And the police?”

“Are you crazy?” Howard seized his tie and fanned himself with it. “Let’s just say that, uh, not all of my checkbooks are balanced. Christ, I’ve got margins to maintain! I won’t be getting the cops involved.”

“All right,” I said. I’d worked for worse. “You’re sure there weren’t any other … signs, besides the ones you told me about?”

“Nope,” he said. “The sounds, the strange breeze, and then—well, the thing that happened on Friday that made them all quit. That’s it. God, I must be going crazy.”

“Everyone feels that way at first,” I said gently.

“Okay,” said Howard. “Well. Hudson Valley kids need their dollar-store crap, and I’ll be damned if they have to go somewhere else to get it. You seem like a smart guy. If anyone can get my warehouse back up and running, you can. Just get to the bottom of this bullshit!”

And so here I was, getting to the bottom of the bullshit with the help of the indefatigable Kayla. Tree-lined hills rolled away to the right, and we caught glimpses of the river off to the left. She was still looking at me, and I sensed I wouldn’t be able to escape her question about my background with just a vague deflection. “Well,” I said, “I took a divinity degree at Oxford.”

“That explains the … half-accent,” said Kayla.

“Quite,” I said. “I spent some other time over there as well. In terms of job prospects, though, divinity isn’t exactly a world-beater. After graduating university, I was looking for work for a while, and eventually I ended up in this business. I’ve helped out quite a few people by now. It turns out there was a lot of demand but not much supply. I’m not rich, but that’s all right—I like the work.”

“I guess that’s what matters,” said Kayla. We passed a road sign reading FISHKILL 8.

“Is there anything else I might need to know?” I asked. “That Howard might not have thought to mention?”

“Mmm,” grunted the young woman. “Those warehouse workers weren’t all that communicative. Howard had me hire them without, uh, dotting every i and crossing every t.” She shook her head. “They were good workers, and there was never any trouble because they knew they’d be in a world of hurt if somebody found out they were on this side of the border. I felt bad for them.”

“Right,” I said. “What about the incident Friday? Howard said you were present at the time.”

“I was outside,” said Kayla. “But I don’t believe anything happened. The cameras don’t record anything. If there was really … a voice, I didn’t hear it. But that’s why it’s so strange that they all quit. If not because of the building, because of … I mean, because of … oh, it sounds stupid, but a ghost, if not because of that, then why?”

“Well,” I said, “sounds like it’s worth a look, anyway.” It definitely was worth a look as far as I was concerned. Tonight’s work was going to earn me a thousand dollars.

After a short meander through the battered old colonial buildings of Fishkill, we pulled up in front of a decaying warehouse. Faded letters painted onto the cracked plaster facade proclaimed the building to be the property of DUTCHESS COUNTY MOVERS. The dilapidated expanse of run-down masonry was punctuated by the gnarled boughs of a couple of dead trees, which would have torn the building apart had they not first succumbed to the polluted soil. “Well,” said Kayla, “this is it.”

“Doesn’t really look haunted,” I said. “Just … sad.” Clearly, no business based in the ramshackle old building had ever been particularly successful. The place embodied the spent ambition and broken dreams of this far-flung eastern tip of the Rust Belt.

“It needs a new coat of paint,” allowed Kayla. “But it’s been doing its job—until recently, at least. It won’t be as grim once all the workers come back.”

“Um,” I said, “right. You have a key?”

“Of course.” She pulled a ring of them from the glove box. “Come on—I’ll give you a tour.”

We got out of the car and crossed the cracked asphalt of the parking lot to a rusty metal door. It took some pulling and jiggling to finally open the latch, but at last it gave way with a shriek of protest from the hinges. And then we were inside.

When Kayla hit a switch near the door, yellowish light washed away a wall of musty darkness. Filthy fluorescent fixtures revealed a dirty space crammed with piles of loose clothing and battered cardboard boxes. The goods had come from FOUR WINDS TRADING CORP and XIFU INDUSTRIES INC, and they looked like exactly the kind of junk you would find on the sale racks at a Telco back in the city. Something small and dark vanished into a pile of socks near my feet; I suspected that it was the kind of spirit that loves cheese and drowns in garbage cans.

“There’s an office in the back there,” said Kayla, pointing to a small hallway leading off the rear of the room. “I imagine you’ll want to spend your time somewhere central, so …”

For the first time, I saw a hint of uncertainty in her eyes. Here she was, alone in a filthy warehouse with me, an expert on the strangest and most unbelievable of all subjects. Despite how professional she was, how together she had it, she was still a very young woman, and probably the absurdity of the situation was drawing that youth to the surface.

“Sure,” I said. “The office will be fine.”

We made our way through the piles of sweatshop junk toward the rear of the warehouse. I felt bad for whoever ended up wearing any of this. It wasn’t my job to pass judgment on anyone’s business practices; this wasn’t the first fly-by-night operation that had called me up, and it wouldn’t be the last. But what a depressing place for a girl like Kayla, who clearly had real potential, to end up.

A splintery particleboard door swung open to reveal a cramped, smelly office. A filing cabinet burst with yellowing papers beside a battered desk and chair. A stained coffee machine sat atop a groaning fridge, all next to an empty watercooler. The only hints of decoration were a stock image of a Polish castle that someone had framed and hung over the desk and a tarnished brass crucifix.

“The bathroom’s across the way,” said Kayla. She gestured to the ancient computer on top of the desk. “This is where I work when I’m here. The computer has access to the security cameras.”

“Has anyone ever tried to break in?” I asked. I struggled to imagine what in that warehouse would be worth stealing.

“Well,” she said, “um, no. But if they did, we’d see them.”

“Right.” I slapped the sticky keyboard and waited for the computer to hum to life. The fan roared with effort at the heavy task of displaying the login screen.

“The password is wextec2025,” said Kayla.

“Very secure,” I murmured, typing it in. Soon a desktop appeared, bereft of any applications other than email, a word processor, and a simple camera feed. It seemed that most of the warehouse was covered by six grainy cameras, although there would be blind spots between mounds of clothing and in corners.

“Is there anything else you think you’ll need to … to find out what’s going on?” asked Kayla.

I smiled. “No, I don’t think so. This will be just fine. You’ve given me all the help I could ask for.”

“All right,” she said. “Wait, one more thing.” Opening one of the drawers of the filing cabinet, she pulled out a book. Cheaply printed and slightly battered, it looked like the type of self-published local history put together by a retiree who’s realized that they’ll soon be history too. “In the movies, there’s always a clue in a book like this. I thought …”

Smiling, I accepted the volume. “I’ll take a look. That’s very helpful; thank you.”

“Okay.” I could see the doubt in her eyes, but she said nothing else. Instead, she detached a few of the keys from her carabiner and handed them over. “Well, these will let you get around the place. Give me a call if you need me.”

And that was that. I accompanied the Gen-Zer, old before her time, off to the van. There was a spring in her step as she went—I could tell she was glad that I would have to stay in the place overnight and not her.

I raised a hand to the van as it departed, then turned, a grin on my face. Ghosts—they’re legendary for a reason. A good haunting can raise gooseflesh on the neck of even the bravest soul. The dead, calling to us … you couldn’t ask for better narrative material.

But ghosts, as any third grader could tell you, are also not real. The air of education, the briefcase, the Mr. Dillard nonsense, it all serves to convince people that I know what I’m talking about, which in turn legitimizes their own groundless, baseless, idiotic fears. It’s only human nature to look for something else to blame for our problems, and when a sharp-dressing, educated-sounding guy is telling you it’s a ghost, you might actually believe it’s a ghost. I didn’t know the real reason those workers had quit, nor would I be finding it. But I would be collecting a handsome fee for “examining” this crappy warehouse overnight.

Speaking of the fee—part of our agreement was that I would be fed dinner, for which purpose a pizza was supposed to be arriving in about a quarter of an hour. Before then, I thought I would go take a look around the lot. Not to find ghosts, of course, but if any part of the place looked like it was about to come down, I wanted to know sooner rather than later.

There wasn’t much to report. A rusty chain-link fence surrounded the property on all sides, separated from the warehouse by a narrow belt of horsetails and dandelions. The ground, slightly boggy, squelched underfoot and sloped gently downward toward the very back of the lot. There was a mound there, a small rise about five feet across covered in tangled, dying shrubs. Beyond that, just underneath the back fence, ran a shallow, marshy gully that would have flowed as a stream in wet weather. Swamp cabbages dotted its muddy banks, the only things in this place that seemed truly green and lively. The water carried on into a culvert through the mound about two feet in diameter, and from there I assumed it flowed to the next property, where it was no longer my business.

The sun was sinking, the gray sky darkening toward a wintry dusk. I rubbed my hands together. The warehouse wasn’t heated; it would be a cold night. Well, fine. It was all part of the job. Still, something about the place left me uneasy—maybe it was the struggling, choking plants all around, or the death-black mud glistening near the culvert, or the chill wind whispering through my hair. I felt myself wishing for nightfall, just so that the day would drop any pretense of good cheer.

There was no reason to be back there anymore, and just then I heard the pizza guy arriving. I fought my way through the vegetation back up to the front of the building.

Back in the office, bolstered by the taste of greasy pepperoni, I let out a chuckle. Imagine what those kids back in high school would say if they could see me now. Look how far I’d come from the burned-out buildings and wood rot of Tacoma! A grand in a night? A coke dealer would be lucky to clear that much.

I nearly jumped out of my skin when a crash rang out from the main space. Cursing, I rose and poked my head out of the office door. It seemed that one of the overhead light fixtures had finally given up the ghost and tumbled to the ground. Maybe the workers had quit because they thought the place was about to come down.

In any case, there was nothing to do now but wait. Around eight, I’d call Kayla, tell her the building wasn’t haunted—because it wasn’t—and collect my check. I didn’t think I’d be able to sleep in the filthy office, but that was just fine, because I’d come prepared. Inside my briefcase was a dog-eared old John Grisham novel.

First, though, I thought I would have some coffee. I filled the machine from the bathroom sink, then added some Café Bustelo from the dented can on top of the fridge. But when I hit the switch, all that emerged from the nozzle was a gluey black muck that smelled like despair. Shuddering, I decided to go without.

Time oozed by. My watch ticked, the sound punctuating the passage of the seconds. I flipped through the pages of the novel. A faint aroma of pepperoni rose from the empty box in the trash can, mingling with the scent of mildew and decay already in the air.

The longer I spent in the place, the more aware I became of just how badly it was falling apart. The light fixture wasn’t the half of it. The office doorframe had begun to rot, and a glance behind the watercooler and the desk revealed that they had been placed to hide even worse water stains. I could hear scurrying from somewhere, and despite the cold, I even spotted a few ants roaming the filthy tiled floor. The warehouse was on borrowed time, its sad existence drawing inevitably toward an ignominious end. Even if I “fixed” whatever this problem was, who was to say the place would still be standing in a few years?

Without coffee, without anything of importance to be doing, I felt my eyes beginning to droop. By now the sun would be down, and all outside would be dark and silent. Despite my surroundings, my body nudged me implacably toward a doze.

All at once, I was standing in a night-shrouded garden.

It was quite warm, the very height of summer, and I remembered that I had to meet someone here. Earlier, at the cocktail party, we made our promises to each other, and I was to pass the night in the joy of her embrace. If only I could find her!

A grassy lawn sloped down toward a gazebo groaning under a riotous crown of flowers. Sarah, always a romantic, would no doubt be awaiting me within. Though it was well after midnight, the light of the full moon overhead stained everything bone white. I straightened my hair, brushed off a moment’s tingle of nerves.

As I stepped through the grass toward the gazebo, a moment’s doubt came to me. Though I knew she would never have forgotten those promises we had made to each other, we had drunk whiskey and wine aplenty since then. I trusted her, I told myself. I trusted her. But there was a path she might yet choose, the straight and narrow path, the path the whole world willed her to take.

A nocturnal breeze played through the plants and flowers around me, ruffling their leaves with almost maternal care. But it provided me with no such comfort …

I awoke, breathing hard. Such a strange dream! All of a sudden, I felt exposed, defenseless. Did something dance at the very edge of my perception, an uncanny presence, a half-illusion?

Rising, I pushed open the office door and poked my head out into the main space. Wait a moment—that was strange. Kayla had definitely turned on the light when we’d first entered the warehouse, and I’d left it on during my sojourn to the back of the lot and dinner afterward. So why was the room now ink black?

I had to have light. As soon as the thought of the enormous dark space just outside the office door had crossed my mind, no peace could follow. All I could think about was what might lurk in that night-shrouded warehouse. It was idiotic, really—what difference did it make to me whether the room outside was lit up or not? But I had to indulge myself.

I found a weak, shoddy flashlight in one of the desk drawers. Raising it high, I took a deep breath and stepped out of the office door. The mounds of clothes and piles of boxes became fantastical monsters in the half-light, huge beasts and coiled serpents waiting to swallow me. I told myself to get over it. There was not—could not be—anything to worry about. How was I, the consummate smooth operator, going to get scared of a rat-infested hole like this?

My feet carried me between the boxes. Nothing happened. I told myself that nothing would happen, that the oppressive silence blanketing the warehouse wasn’t a sign of anything in particular. But the darkness pressed in on me from all sides, and I found myself checking over my shoulders every few moments, looking for what I did not know. I felt a presence in the place with me, watching me, marking my every step.

Then something darted through the edge of my field of view. I yelped, then clapped a hand over my mouth. The beam of my flashlight followed the motion, but I saw nothing, nothing at all.

I must have been losing my nerve. The warehouse was empty! I had nothing to fear. With another deep breath, I started once again toward the switch.

My senses tingled. Deep in my being stirred primordial memories, memories from frightened little apes in the shrouded forests of prehistoric Africa. The tiny creatures had lived life on the edge, darting under the shade of a branch at the slightest sign of a hawk overhead. That ancient DNA screamed at me that I was exposed, that I was in danger, that I was being—being watched. But by what?

A few final steps carried me to the far wall. I nearly tripped on a pile of T-shirts in my eagerness to reach the switch, but when at last my hand hit the cold metal and plastic and the room blazed with light, I let out a gasp of relief. I looked behind myself. There was no monster waiting to devour me, no marauder about to stab me, nothing. I cursed my own foolishness—but no harm had come of it.

In the light, the piles of clothing and stacks of boxes didn’t look quite so threatening. Still, between the dream I’d had and now the ordeal of trying to get across the room to the switch, I felt heartily sick of them.

That feeling of being watched hadn’t gone away after I’d turned on the light. My nerves were determined to torment me. I headed back across the room and shut myself up in the office once again. Then, with a sigh, I picked up my novel and got back to reading.

Fifteen minutes later, I had given that up too. I just couldn’t focus. My thoughts raced, my senses buzzed. What was more, Grisham’s latest focused on a fraud case, and that felt a bit too close to home for my tastes—not that a prison cell would really have been much of a step down from that horrible office.

I decided to check the cameras. Booting up the computer, I waited for the app to load, impatiently tapping at the mouse until it finally did. I thought that perhaps being able to keep an eye on the warehouse might give me some comfort.

The grainy black-and-white feeds revealed little. Outside, in the parking lot, a plastic bag blew by in the wind—but that was all. I swallowed. Somehow, the stark monochrome images made me uneasy.

Well. I pulled out the local history Kayla had given me. That kind of dry nonsense wasn’t my usual choice of reading material, but at the very least it wouldn’t remind me of the liability associated with my choice of career. Soon enough, I was absorbed in the story of early Fishkill, the town’s gallant founders, and all the political intrigue, war, and moneygrubbing that had followed in the next several hundred years.

The windowless office didn’t permit a view of the night sky outside, but soon I began to dream of the sight of a new day dawning. Only sunlight, I thought, could banish the unease that had begun to claw at me. Was I going mad? It had to be madness—to accept the alternative would be mad as well.

I stiffened. Someone was there. I couldn’t say how I knew it, but I did, as surely as I knew my own name. A presence—a presence loomed beyond the office door, somewhere out in the main space. It hovered, not advancing, but simply waiting, waiting for I knew not what.

For several long moments, I sat rooted to the spot. Cold fear clawed at me, freezing my blood, freezing my nerves. I could not move. I could not move, could not react, could not defend myself as the thing outside—as the thing outside began to come closer.

It was terribly cold. I swore that I could hear the crackling of ice spreading over the damp walls, climbing into me, choking my very soul. I shivered. I was capable of nothing else, could not so much as blink. The presence drew nearer.

A whispering filled the air. The soft, reedy sound tickled at my eardrums, seeming to come from every direction at once, from within me as well as without. There were words, but I could not understand them. I did not know if they were intended for me at all. What was I to this being? Did I want to know?

I heard a ragged, choked wheeze. After a moment’s alarm, I realized that the sound had issued from my own throat. My mind, my body, both were being overwhelmed. Then I realized: The icy draft coming in around the door was not simply air. Something was forming inside the office, before my very eyes, something terrible indeed. I opened my mouth to scream—

Two figures stood in the gazebo, silhouetted in the ghastly white light from that skullish moon. The sucking sounds of interlocking lips reached me before I could even see their faces. It did not matter; I knew who they were.

So Sarah had decided on the easy path after all.

The realization landed on me dully, thickly, like a hammer falling into sawdust. I had known deep down that this would happen one day, that love like ours could never thrive among those who could not understand. But why, I wanted to cry, why now? Why this way? If not me, then why him?

Deep hatred for her boiled within me, but that hatred was nothing compared to the glowering sun of loathing for the man she embraced, a grim star blazing over my very soul. And that star itself flickered dull and insignificant before the vast sheet of flame, the great tower of fire, that was my fury at myself.

How had I fallen so? How had I ignored the inevitable? How had I allowed myself—at long last, for once in my life—to dream?

A cry of horror escaped my lips.

With a cold, rattling gasp, I awoke. The presence had vanished, leaving me alone in the office.

Swallowing, I remembered the cameras. If they had captured something … part of my mind violently rejected the idea that had just come to me, but the rest soldiered on, lured by a morbid curiosity. Waking the computer from sleep, I could see nothing on the feeds, but—yes, the past twenty-four hours of footage were archived in files. It took a few moments to find the right one, to scrub the video forward until I reached a point just five minutes in the past.

As the video played, I swallowed. I had hoped there would be nothing there. I had hoped that the footage would serve as evidence for nothing more than my own insanity. But there, on the screen … I saw a bright flash of light coming toward the office door. It was hazy, indistinct, but undeniable. I even fancied I could see limbs, the motion of a walking figure, but no doubt that really was the product of madness.

I wanted to run. I wanted to leave this place behind and head for the hills. A thousand dollars? Pocket change! Not at all worth enduring the things I had endured tonight. But I couldn’t—this much I knew for certain. There was something I had to do. What it was I could not say, but I imagined, mad though I knew it was, that the being had somehow left the idea in my mind.

Picking up my history book, I began to read once more. My addled mind could no longer put together much of a narrative. Tales of elections, immigration, and the First World War came and went. There was nothing, nothing at all to explain why this place should be the place it was.

The passage of time in the book tricked me—I could cover twenty years at a stretch and look up to find only half an hour had ticked past. With each moment, I wondered when the thing, whatever it was, would return. It had to come, this I knew, and with equal certainty I knew that I would be there to witness it. I had thought of fleeing, but that I could not do. I did not understand—with my conscious mind—what the entity wanted with me, but its power over my mind grew with each moment I spent in its presence. At the thought of running away, my feet seemed to freeze in my shoes.

Then, toward the end of my book: a footnote. Just a footnote. Its text was almost too small to be read.

June 22, 1938: In a mystery that puzzles local historians to this day, a local woman, Mary Katherine Graham, vanished after a quarrel with a friend over a local man. Though she is presumed dead, no evidence has been found as to her fate.

I breathed in. The whispering was back, tickling at my eardrums. I could almost understand the words now, so powerful had the entity grown, so near to the surface world had it drawn. The cold clawed at me, so painful that I wanted to scream for mercy, but my tongue would not move, my lips would not part. I dropped the book, clutched at my face—

And then I was gone.

I stood by a little stream, a murmuring current fed by the late-spring rains. She had abandoned me. The betrayal in the gazebo had not been the first. What a fool I had been! She had never seen me as more than a distraction, as an interesting footnote in a long list of lovers. There could be no lifelong romance, no marriage, no common fate with one like me.

The stream trickled by before me, and I weighed the pistol between my fingers. Though I was not far from the village, not many came this way. It would be a long time before they found my body—if indeed they found it at all.

The firearm glistened in the moonlight.

Then I was back in the office. Unlike the other lapses into the beyond, this one had left my mind clear and sharp, though also frayed and restless. I let out a gasp. My conscious brain, my reasoning brain, could not have explained what was happening, but my soul hummed in tune to some frequency I could not name. It was enough.

Seizing the flashlight, I ran from the office. The piles of clothing, as shadowy as before in the newly darkened main room, held no terror for me any longer. I weaved between them with a single-mindedness bordering on insanity. An icy freshness carved my skin, and I was near the door now, near the outside—

Something struck my feet, and I went flying forward. I cried out; pain pulsed from my palms as I landed on the ground. The gravel of the parking lot had scraped my hands raw. It seemed that I had tripped over the threshold.

The sharp pain returned me for a moment to something resembling ordinary consciousness. What was I doing? Why was I out here, lying on my stomach in a parking lot in the Hudson Valley, chasing some bizarre presence with no right to exist? Why was I—

And then—a sigh. Patient, yes, not threatening, but insistent, very insistent. And I remembered now the feeling of standing by that gazebo, of watching my life be torn apart, and although it had not been my life, I knew what I had to do, and I rose from the ground and hurried back toward the rear of the warehouse.

The ferns and brambles from before could not dissuade me—nothing could. I crashed through them with mad strength, hurling my body along the crumbling masonry wall of the building. It was not far now, not far at all.

Cold whispered at me. I came to the culvert, and the mound next to it, the mound that should never have been there. Without a moment’s hesitation, I plunged into the ankle-deep mud of the streambed, shuffling clumsily into the culvert. The black plastic walls constricted me, choking the life from me, but I shuffled on because I had no other choice, because it was the only way.

And then, at a point about six feet into the tunnel, I drew to a halt. A blast of chill tore at me. There was a hole there in the wall of the culvert, a hole about six inches across, and something pale and hard poked out into the passageway, something that was not a root or a piece of garbage or anything else other than what I knew it had to be.

My head grew light, and I fainted away. “Mr. Dillard!”

Who?

“Mr. Dillard! Can you hear me?” What would anyone want with me?

“Christ, Mr. Dillard, wake up, oh God—”

There was no need to be upset. My eyelids fluttered open. “Kayla?” I muttered.

Morning light bathed the scene. Kayla stood over me, a wide-eyed, childlike fear written all over her face. She really was very young. Behind her, men in dark uniforms, an ambulance. “Mr. Dillard,” she cried. “Wh-what happened?”

I lay in the mouth of the culvert, covered in filth and smelling like a storm drain. Exhaustion had carved itself into my bones. My mind jangled with a terror that I knew would never fully dissipate. I would have to change careers after this, I thought, and become a barista or a farmer or any kind of profession where night work was never necessary. “She … she …”

“She—she who?” Kayla shook me. “You’re not making sense!”

A smile spread itself across my face. “She showed me.”