Chapter 3: The Crosstown Line
The interior of the bus smelled of wet wool, diesel exhaust, and cheap floor wax. Only three other passengers were scattered along the vinyl seats: a tired-looking night-shift nurse nodding off near the back, a young man with a guitar case staring blankly at his phone, and an old woman huddled under a patchwork quilt near the front. I sat midway down, keeping the cardboard box balanced securely on my knees.
Maya would be asleep by now, curled up on the narrow pull-out sofa in our two-room apartment above the dry cleaner’s. Mrs. Gable, the retired seamstress who lived next door, always checked in on her at nine, but the thought of my seven-year-old daughter waking up alone in that drafty room made my chest tighten with a sharp, familiar panic. I pulled out my phone—a cracked prepaid model with a failing battery—and stared at the dark screen. There were no missed calls. Julian didn't have my number; he had never had a reason to store it, despite the countless hours we had spent breathing the same recirculated air within those stone walls.
The bus lurched as it crossed the drawbridge over the industrial canal, the steel grates groaning under the tires. I closed my eyes and let the rhythmic hum of the engine wash over me.
How had Clara found out? That was the question looping through my mind like a broken record. For five years, I had been invisible. I never lingered by the study. I never looked Julian in the eye when he poured his own scotch at midnight. I kept my head down, took my wages in cash from the agency, and vanished before the morning briefings. But two weeks ago, Maya had drawn a picture during her after-school program at the community center—a portrait of a man with silver-templed hair and a sharp suit, standing beside a large stone fountain. She had written Daddy in clumsy, uneven crayon across the bottom corner.
The drawing had somehow found its way into the house inside my cleaning bag. Clara must have opened the side pocket while looking for the spare keys to the wine cellar.
May you like
A sharp metallic clink broke my train of thought. I looked down at the box. The vibration of the bus had shifted the contents, and the small gold button had worked its way through a tear in the cardboard lining, resting right against my thumb. I picked it up, turning it over in my palm. The raised pattern—a small, intricate ivy leaf—was identical to the crest embossed on the stationery Julian used for private correspondence. It wasn't just a button. It was a fragment of the coat he had been wearing the night Maya was conceived in the gardener’s lodge behind the greenhouse, before the world closed in and built walls around us both.
The bus slowed to a stop outside the neon-lit sign of the Midnight Diner, its yellow letters flickering through the rain-streaked glass. I stood up, gripped my box, and stepped out into the wet night air.
