Joel doesn’t contact Cassie at all after he leaves the bookstore.
It’s unusual to not even get one text from him in an entire afternoon when he’s not working. She tries to push away the sick feeling in her stomach, but it’s hard. He’s obviously gutted over what happened to Francesca.
When Cassie gets out her phone for the tenth time to check for a missed text, Zoe gives her a look. “Quit being needy. He’ll call you soon.”
“He was really upset…”
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Zoe says.
“I accused his dead girlfriend of stalking me.”
She lets out a huff. “It’s his fault for not telling you she’s dead. What the hell is wrong with him?”
Cassie wracks her brain for missed cues that Francesca was gone. She always seemed so present in their lives, even when she wasn’t actually there. Even her restaurant is still open. How could a woman like that be dead?
“Go home,” Zoe says. “You’re hurting our sales with your bad attitude.”
Cassie snorts. They’ve only had two people come into the store all afternoon, both of them looking for medical books. It’s time for Bookland to close its doors. She can’t keep this up—not if she wants to avoid serious repercussions.
It’s already dark out, even though it’s barely dinnertime. They won’t have many more customers tonight, if any. So Cassie decides to take Zoe’s advice and head home early.
Despite her warm coat and hat, Cassie shivers the second she steps outside. The cold air is like a slap in the face, although she’s not certain if that’s the reason a chill went through her body. Somebody’s been following her. Someone’s been writing slurs about her at both her store and her apartment. And that someone isn’t the person she’d believed it to be.
“Cold, ain’t it?”
Cassie looks up and sees Maureen the Homeless Lady grinning at her from her usual spot on the sidewalk. Maureen’s bundled up in her thick winter coat, paired with a scarf and hat, but to be fair, she wears all
that year round. Even on the hottest day of August, Maureen’s got that coat on.
Cassie glares at Maureen, a bubble of frustration rising in her chest. “What did you see?” she rasps at the woman sitting on the sidewalk. “You must have seen something!”
Maureen throws back her head and lets out that familiar cackle that makes Cassie’s skin crawl. “I ain’t seen nothing!”
“But you must have!” Cassie cries. “You must! You were right here!”
The smile abruptly drops off of Maureen’s face. And then she’s just staring, her jaw slack, her eyes empty. Cassie remembers when she saw Maureen at the window to the hardware store—it had really freaked her out. She never figured out what Maureen had been doing there.
“Maureen?” Cassie’s voice wavers on the name. Maureen the Homeless Lady doesn’t say a word. I’ve got to get out of here.
Cassie turns away from Maureen, who is still in that catatonic state. She hugs her coat tighter to her chest and hurries in the direction of the subway.
Except Cassie somehow finds herself going to a different station than her usual. She doesn’t make the decision exactly—her feet take her there on their own accord. But she recognizes she’s at the train station that will take her in the direction of Francesca’s restaurant.
She doesn’t know why she’s doing it. She just knows she has to go there.
Cassie rides the subway until she reaches the stop for Angela’s Ristorante. The sun has vanished from the sky and her footsteps crunch against bits of snow in the pavement as she makes her way to the tiny restaurant with the red, white, and green awning.
Cassie looks at the sign over the restaurant. The word “Angela” is written in beautiful script. Who was Angela? Was Angela someone close to Francesca? A relative she loved or respected? Or just a name she liked?
Cassie suspects she’ll never know the answer to that question, since she will never meet Francesca.
A cold wind whips around the corner and Cassie shivers, hugging herself. She walks closer to the restaurant—close enough that she can see inside at the small establishment that Francesca built in the years before her death. She peers through the glass at the strangers enjoying their
meals. Well, they’re not all strangers. There’s one person she recognizes all too well:
Joel. Sitting at a table in the back, his head bowed.
She shouldn’t be surprised. Of course, he’d come here when he’s thinking of Francesca. She remembers catching him here months ago. She wonders how often he comes here. It must comfort him. Remind him of the woman he had loved.
She has a feeling that the characters in his own Wuthering Heights are Joel and Francesca. Certainly not Joel and Cassie. After all, Francesca is the one who haunts him, even after she’s gone.
In any case, she hurries away before he can catch sight of her.
It’s nearly eight by the time Cassie gets off the subway by her apartment building. It’s very dark by now, and the streets are deserted. She walks as quickly as she can down the pavement, trying to push away the feeling that somebody is behind her. She can almost hear footsteps.
If Francesca hasn’t been threatening me, then who is?
Because somebody has been making those calls. Somebody wrote “slut” on her door. It isn’t in her head.
Unless it’s the ghost of Francesca.
No, not too likely. Grandma Bea spent the last several years of her life praying for Grandpa Marv to return as a ghost. If anyone was going to come back as a ghost, it would have been Marv. If there’s a heaven, he was certainly up there, pleading with St. Peter, Let me go down there and be with Bea.
But the fact that Ghost Marv never made any appearances, except in Bea’s imagination, is enough to convince Cassie the afterlife is not a thing.
When Cassie finally reaches her building, she discovers the lights that usually shine right outside the door have burned out. It’s pitch black as she fumbles in her purse for her keys. It’s so dark, anyone could be standing behind her and she’d never know.
Where are those goddamn keys?
When she gets the door to the building open and locked behind her, she breathes a sigh of relief. She can’t shake the feeling someone is watching her. But who? And why?
Now that she’s safe inside the building, she takes the elevator up to her apartment. She leans against the wall, totally spent. She can’t wait to get into her apartment. And then into the bathtub.
She was in her bathtub, her wrists slit and… she was cold by then.
Cassie closes her eyes, trying not to think of Francesca. Is this the way it’s going to be? Is Francesca going to haunt everything she does from now on? Is she literally haunting her right now?
Maybe Joel can’t push the thoughts from his head, but Cassie can. She starts the hot water going in the bathtub and plugs the drain. Then she goes to her bedroom to fetch some warm, cozy clothes. She shuffles through her closet, looking for a nice, warm fleece.
And that’s when she sees the black ink at the back of her closet.
Her heart pounding, she pushes her clothes aside, parting them to get a view of the wall behind them. There’s writing. In the back of her closet.
In black ink, someone has scribbled the word “SLUT.”
Someone was in her apartment. Not a ghost. A human being entered her home when she wasn’t there, picked up a marker, and wrote that word on the wall.
Cassie hears the screaming as she backs away from the closet. It takes her a moment to identify the voice as her own.
