Brooke was wearing her school blazer and eating chicken soup. Sunlight was falling across the salt shaker. I had already suspected enough to know suspicion was no longer morally neutral. So I tore a sheet of paper from the pad by the refrigerator, wrote down a number only she would have, slid it across the table, and said, “This line belongs to you. Use it if you ever need to.”
She folded it once, carefully, and put it in the inside pocket of her jacket.
Eight months later, at 3:17 in the morning, she used it.
I answered.
I came.
That is the whole of it.
THE END
