Chapter Text
The dealer’s room at NorWestMidWestCon isn’t one of the selling points, but Charlie’s taking a turn through anyway, killing time looking at corsets made out of Dr. Who-themed quilting cotton, and cat’s ears of varying quality. The book dealers are mostly selling used books. She’s halfway through a vendor’s offerings when it snags her — Mystery Spot, #22 in a series of books she’s never heard of.
She pulls it out and reads the back cover. Standard pulp take on a Groundhog Day plot. Nothing that should interest her. Reads the first page. Decent writing, but she’s seen better. Hell, she’s written better.
Standard manly-man heroes taking on a cliche plotline. It shouldn’t interest her.
But it does. It’s familiar. It’s nagging at her. It’s like an aching tooth.
She turns to the booth’s proprietor, a man with a scraggly gray beard and a Starfleet Academy T-shirt. “Hey, do you know anything about this series?”
The man shrugs. “Not really. They’ve got a bit of a cult following, though.”
Charlie checks the inside cover for the price. Wait, what?
“Twenty bucks for a used paperback? Really?”
“They don’t sell on Amazon,” the guy says. “But in person — I get fans in here regular who try to buy them for $40, $50. You don’t want it, someone else will.”
Charlie goes to put the book back, but it’s like it’s stuck to her hand — she can’t put it down. (Some part of her doesn’t want to put it down.)
She peels a $20 out of her wallet and hands it over to the man, who nods without looking at her and puts the money in his lockbox before setting his chin back down into a ragged H. Beam Piper.
She shrugs, throws the book into her Bag of Holding, and heads off. She’s meeting some folks from one of her online groups for a one-stop pub crawl of the hotel bar in ten, and she wants to dump stuff off at her room first.
* * *
It’s a few weeks after the con when Charlie finally gets around to cleaning up all the swag she brought home — the con book and the crap she brought back from Dealer’s Row and all the free postcards and stickers they picked up from the bid tables, and shit, is that Lana’s phone number? On paper?
“Sorry, H,” she says, looking over at bobblehead Hermione Granger standing on her desk and feeling vaguely guilty. She’s usually better about cleaning up than this. She’s been avoiding the pile of junk on the counter since the con.
The reason becomes clear when she finds Supernatural #22: Mystery Spot.
She reads it that night.
It’s not good. Not really. It doesn’t pass the Bechdel test — hell, it doesn’t have female characters, not really. It’s nothing she’d normally read.
But it’s compelling. It’s tickling something in her brain that she can’t quite place.
She throws it into the Goodwill bag by the door after she’s done reading it, but three days later, she takes it out, and looks up Carver Edlund on Amazon.
No listings for sale — yeah, the books are indexed in the system, but the bookseller was right — there is nothing listed for sale on the actual website.
Weird.
She starts digging into it a bit — checks out Abebooks.
“Oh, that isn’t right.” She rocks back in her chair.
It looks like someone’s trying to hide their tracks. Someone’s cut the link between the books existing and the books being for sale. And that someone looks like they used some tricks that are a lot like the ones Charlie keeps up her sleeve.
She finds a couple copies indexed in the warehouse of one of the major used booksellers and drops an order into their system, bypassing the front end. Maybe more books will clear this up.
* * *
Over the next few weeks, paper and cardboard and plastic packages containing copies of Supernatural show up at Charlie’s PO box. The Post Office workers start getting curious, but Charlie just shrugs.
More books don’t explain anything — they’re still nothing Charlie would have read for any normal reason, but she’s got that sense of deja vu, that feeling that maybe this is what could explain the thing she does not think of.
She starts indexing locations, keeping a Google Earth pinboard of confirmed locations from the books. Some of them have been moved. The Mystery Spot in Charlie’s universe is in California, not Florida, and there’s some other weirdness like that.
After ten books, Charlie gives in and dives into the online fan forums.
They’re dying — Charlie’s been in enough fandoms to recognize the stench of a decaying fanbase. But there are still a few die-hards.
She cuts herself off from the fan forums when she finds herself weighing in on a topic about whether the “real” Sam and Dean look anything like the models on the covers of the books. How do I have an opinion about this?
But then she reads the next shipment from the Post Office, and she’s got a continuity question, and she’s sucked back in.
* * *
The fan forums are where she finds the tattoo.
Her tattoo. The one on her shoulder. The tattoo that she doesn’t remember getting.
Charlie pushes the computer back and goes to the couch, wraps herself up in a blanket. I’m not shaking, you’re shaking.
The tattoo. The thing about the past couple years — the years she mostly doesn’t remember, or remembers only parts of — that freaks her out the most, apart from the thing she does not think about, which really fucking freaks her out, but that’s why she doesn’t think about it.
She remembers her ComicCon tattoo. Not much about getting it, but there’s a story leading up to it, a story leading past it. She’s got coherent memories on either side of that event.
And besides. Her Princess Leia tattoo is adorable. She might have been drunk, but it’s in character.
Getting a tattoo from a series of manpain adventure novels? A series she doesn’t even remember reading?
She swallows down on nausea.
She needs to find the author. She needs to know.
* * *
Searching for Carver Edlund — it’s hard. Someone hid his tracks extremely well, so well he might almost be dead. There’s eight years of message board and forum posts from his fans, including some who are fanatically, frighteningly devoted to the topic. None of them have found so much as a whiff of the man.
Charlie finds the later books, the books that were only posted online, early in the process. At first she assumes they’re just more fanfic, but there’s something about the feel of the writing — something that gives her the same feeling of almost knowing that she gets from the books.
She breaks into a university server to steal some code for corpus analysis, which tells her what she already knew. Written by the same person.
But — and here’s the weird thing — BeckyWinchester176, the one who posted them, is clearly not the author of the books. And she’s active in the fan forums. Charlie reads through all her posts and decides that if BeckyWinchester176 knew where Carver Edlund was right now, she’d be sharing. Maybe not the location, but she’d be making the sort of coy can’t tell you everything, it wouldn’t be safe! posts that she was making a few years back, under one of her earlier handles.
So that’s not a lead.
Charlie tries putting up a murder board in her apartment, like on Castle or any of a billion other TV shows, but having photos of Carver Edlund (from his con appearances) and putting up actual physical pushpins in an actual physical map map doesn’t shake anything loose.
* * *
In the end, as with so many things, the answer involves throwing more processing time at the problem.
Charlie’s out for a run. She’s been sleeping badly. The nightmares are back, but this time, instead of trying to protect her mother, she’s racing down corridors and fighting her way to her mother’s room, only to see a shadow version of herself there beside the bed.
She’s not normally a runner, but waking up three times a night after facing The Thing She Doesn’t Think About — yeah, she’ll try everything AskMetafilter can throw at her nightmare problem, thanks. So she’s off coffee and she’s eating healthy and taking magnesium supplements and she’s, ugh, doing yoga and running.
And trying to find Carver Edlund.
She’s out on a long loop by the reservoir — it’s funny; she doesn’t remember running, but it’s like her body does. She’s not hitting any of the aches and pains that her research told her to expect as a n00b runner.
That day’s mission on Run, Zombies, Run! finishes up just as Charlie comes out to the bit of the path at the top of the reservoir, looking over the water. It’s a cool, foggy day, and the water looks like mercury, sullen and silver under the faded spring sky.
Charlie turns off the app and lets her music keep running. What was she doing in those wilderness years she can’t remember, apart from getting a tattoo she hates and reading trashy manpain novels and apparently taking up running? She was still herself, right? Should she start running facial recognition on LARP groups and con photos?
She starts walking home. It’s funny how people don’t change — you always go back to what you’re used to.
And then she realizes something. Carver Edlund — he didn’t seem like the kind of guy who could do anything but write. She’s seen footage of him, just a few videos from the one con he did. He’s an indoors geek, through and through.
And if he’s still alive, he’s got to be paying the bills somehow.
When Charlie gets back to her apartment, she steals some processing cycles from a supercomputer that’s meant to be crunching Republican voting demographics. Sets it looking through writing — more corpus analysis. It’s a needle in a haystack, but it’s also the one trail someone might have overlooked.
It’s three days later when her automated scan pings: Carver Edlund, or at least someone writing a great deal like Carver Edlund, has been located.
“Hah!” Charlie punches the air. “My kung fu is the best kung fu.”
The scan pinged on The Marvey Brothers Mysteries #13: Mystery of the Painted Peril. It looks like a series of tie-in novels. Charlie re-sets her parameters to run on Bob DeWolfe, author of The Marvey Brothers Mysteries, which pulls up another handful of Marvey Brothers books written by Carver Edlund. Apparently he’s sharing writing responsibilities on this one.
Unlike Supernatural, these books are available in e-Book form, which makes it easy for Charlie to download and read.
They’re terrible. Really terrible. A knockoff of The Hardy Boys, but with more swamp monsters and cursed masks.
They give Charlie none of the familiarity feels she’s been getting from Supernatural.
But they’re being written now. He’s active. He can be traced.
Charlie has to hack the accounting systems at the publisher and the book packager to trace the payments on her Marvey Brothers books to checks going out to someone going by the name Connor Allison in a small town in Manitoba, Canada.
Manitoba?
Connor Allison has no web presence — there are other people by that name out there, but none of them are writers from Manitoba. None of them look like Carver Edlund. And he hasn’t left many traces on his publisher’s system, either. He submits his books on a thumb drive, and his agent is the only one who seems to call him — and she must use some sort of Stone-Age tech, like a Rolodex and a landline, because that number is nowhere in his system.
But his agent has Conner Allison’s address.
* * *
Charlie’s planning the trip to visit Carver Edlund (Bob DeWolfe. No, Connor Allison) before she realizes that’s what she’s done.
Why not email? Or write? But Charlie instinctively knows he won’t respond.
“We can’t give him an out, H,” Charlie says.
H doesn’t reply, but Charlie thinks she looks sympathetic. Hermione Granger knows about impossible problems.
The first question is which of Charlie’s identities will hold up to a border crossing. Charlie Bradbury — she’s not sure why she’s even still in this identity, if she’s honest with herself. Hoping for someone to find her? She probably won’t make it into Canada, though. And Celeste — Charlie stops herself there. The thing she does not think about.
She’s got a reserve identity or three set up for herself, though. After studying them for a bit, she decides that Stephanie Verne will do. She’s already got the passport, so she just has to get the credit history set.
Charlie rents a car to make the trip to Manitoba, so she can ditch and fly back if she needs to. It’s a long drive — miles of planted fields. They’re just planted, all plowed furrows and short corn seedlings. Charlie stops for the night in South Dakota, and she sees fields of corn sprouts behind her eyes as she tries to fall asleep.
It feels familiar, the next morning — waking up, sweeping the room, grabbing toast and peanut butter from the crappy hotel breakfast bar. Stopping at a gas station and pounding back a bottled Frappucino. Her body recognizes this.
I’ve done this before.
But she hasn’t. Or if she has, she doesn’t remember.
* * *
That afternoon, Charlie passes over the border — a bit of anxiety in an otherwise cornfield-filled day. Stephanie Verne holds up beautifully, though.
She decides to stop a few towns before getting to where Carver Edlund now lives. She tells itself it’s so she’s rested tomorrow — so she doesn’t show up on his doorstop too tired to argue him into telling her what’s going on here.
The truth is, she needs one more day to figure out what she’s going to say to him. One more night. Now that she’s on the road, looking for answers, maybe she’ll get some sleep.
She heads out for a run after she checks into her hotel — by the chain restaurants clustered around the exit, and out into the flat of the agricultural fields. The fields are muddy, torn up, huge puddles reflecting the sunset.
Charlie sets her head down and runs.
* * *
Charlie chooses her time carefully: 11:30, late enough that he’ll feel like he’ll need to open the door.
She chooses her clothing carefully, too. Standard-issue geek: babydoll tee with geeky slogan (unrelated to Supernatural), jeans, flannel, hoodie. His books seem pretty geeky. Maybe he’ll think of her as one of his tribe.
She brings coffee, too. Just in case.
Charlie’s heart is beating in her chest like she’s been sprinting when she steps up the stairs of the house. It’s in the center of town, a mid-century prefab with a porch with peeling paint.
She knocks at the door. No answer.
She waits a few minutes, and then knocks again. Finally, several minutes later, the door opens, on a security chain.
A man just taller than her is inside. He’s wearing a robe, and his hair is sticking up.
“What?” he asks.
Charlie swallows. “Carver Edlund?”
His eyes narrow through the gap. “Nobody here by that name.”
“Wait,” Charlie says. “I know you wrote Supernatural. I… I need to ask you some things.”
“Lady, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He’s closing the door. “I know you’re really Chuck Shurley,” Charlie says. “And — and if you don’t answer some questions, I can tell all the Supernatural fan boards where you are.”
The door closes, and Charlie feels her heart sinking. Didn’t mean to play that card. She wouldn’t tell them — well, maybe. But probably not.
Then the door opens, normally this time. The man inside is clearly Carver Edlund, the one from the con photos Charlie’s seen.
“You wouldn’t,” he says. “How the hell did you find me, anyway?”
“Can I come inside?” Charlie asks. “I brought coffee.”
He steps back from the door and waves his hand vaguely. Inside, it’s a cave filled with old dishes, books, and stacks of paper. The light streams in through half-closed curtains over dusty windows.
Charlie hands over a bottled Frappucino, and he makes a face.
“Just for the record, this doesn’t count as bringing coffee.”
Charlie shrugs. “Not like this town has a Starbucks.” She shifts a stack of Marvey Brothers books from the couch and sits down. The springs collapse under her, leaving her ass several inches below her knees.
Carver Edlund sits down across from her, in his desk chair, one of the few open surfaces in the room. “So?”
“The Marvey Brothers?” Charlie asks. “Really?”
“They were invented by a book packager in the Seventies who was very high on acid,” he says. He glares at the Frappucino bottle, and then peels back the plastic to open it. “Don’t be a hater.”
Charlie pointedly looks down at the stack of books next to her. On the cover of the top one, Hank and Trey Marvey are fighting a creature copyright-infringed from the Black Lagoon.
“Fine,” she says. “What should I call you? Bob? Connor?”
“Chuck.”
“Fine. Chuck, what can you tell me about Supernatural?”
“It’s a series of books,” Chuck says. “I’m glad you’ve enjoyed the journeys of Sam and Dean. I’m flattered by the attention, but the Supernatural books are a product of my possibly over-active imagination. I have no intention of writing a sequel.”
“Nice con speech, dude.” Charlie leans back. “I found your sequels.”
Chuck looks — confused. He takes a sip from the Frappucino bottle and makes a face. “What sequels?”
“The ones posted on the internet,” Charlie says. “Did you not know that someone posted them?”
“I didn’t write any sequels.”
Charlie pulls out her tablet. “Yeah, well, corpus analysis says you did.”
“What?”
“It’s how I found you,” Charlie says. She pulls up one of the later books and hands the tablet over to Chuck. “See?”
He looks at her like she’s lost the plot, but he takes the tablet and reads through it for a bit before handing it back to her. “I didn’t write this.”
“Or you don’t remember writing it.”
He stares at her, then, for a long moment.
“Fine,” he says, finally. “Fine. You can buy me breakfast. Somewhere outside of this house. This isn’t turning into a Misery thing.”
Charlie holds up her hands. “I don’t even own a pig.”
Chuck sighs. “That’s not making me feel better right now.” He looks at her again. “I’m going to get dressed.”
“Fine,” Charlie says.
“And don’t touch my computer while I’m gone.”
“Promise.”
Charlie smiles. Like she’d need to physically touch his computer.
* * *
The diner’s at the center of town, in a crappy run-down commercial strip with more vacant storefronts than active businesses. It’s lunchtime now, so Charlie orders a grilled cheese and a Diet Coke. Chuck orders the pancake special, side of bacon, side of sausage, and keep the coffee coming.
He’s through the first cup before his eyes are properly open. “You’re paying for my breakfast.”
“Fine.” Charlie sips at the Diet Coke. Flat.
Chuck stares down into his coffee, and then looks up at Charlie. “So how did you find me? Did you bribe my agent? Because she swore she wouldn’t tell.”
“I found you myself. I told you. Corpus analysis.”
“I think you’re lying,” Chuck says. “I think my agent squealed.”
Charlie smiles. “It’s also how I found your AO3 account. I didn’t think Carver Edlund would be writing explicit —“
“Shut up,” Chuck hisses.
“I’m Charlie,” she says. “I’m here because I’m not sure what happened to me, and I think your series might have some answers for me. I know that sounds stupid, but I’m — I’m running out of straws here, dude.”
He stares at her.
“And — okay, so stop me if I’m wrong. But do you remember everything? Or did you wake up with part of your memory missing one day?”
Chuck sits back. He’s wearing a hoodie, and he looks like he wants to pull the hood up and disappear into it, wrap himself up inside his clothing until he blinks out of existence.
“Yeah,” he says, finally. “Yeah, maybe.”
Charlie’s heart starts beating faster. “Okay.”
“It — look, you have to understand. When I was writing Supernatural.... I wrote forty books in two years. You know who keeps that pace? Nobody. I’d get a blinding headache, drink myself to sleep, and then wake up with the whole story there in my mind. I’d write that day’s pages and then it started all over again. The publisher couldn’t keep up with me.”
“So why’d you stop?” Charlie asks.
“I’m not sure that I did stop.”
The food arrives. Charlie’s grilled cheese has an enormous stack of fries and a tiny cup of coleslaw on the side.
Chuck eats a few pieces of bacon and gets another coffee refill, and then looks back up. “When you’re a recovering alcoholic and you tell your doctor you’ve got memory loss… it’s like, No shit, Sherlock.”
“How many years?”
“I don’t know,” Chuck says. “I remember writing the series, and then the publisher went under, and then… things get a little hazy after that. When I came out of it, I was by the side of the road in Manitoba with a laptop I didn’t remember buying and nine thousand, nine hundred, and ninety bucks. Canadian.”
“And you stayed in Manitoba? Why?”
“Why not?” Chuck’s eating his sausage now. “Houses are cheap here. They have internet.”
“Yeah, but…” Charlie realizes she’s sidetracking. “And you don’t remember anything about the time in between?”
“Not really. Vague, hazy shit. But I’m not sure what’s really my memories and what’s the stuff I was writing in Supernatural, you know?”
Charlie has a theory about that, but she knows it sounds crazy. So she takes another bite of her grilled cheese.
Chuck keeps eating his breakfast. Every now and then he glances at her from under his hoodie.
“So what’s your theory?” Chuck says, finally. “What do you think happened?”
Charlie’s been thinking about how to share this. “Tell you what,” she says. “If I email you the rest of the books you don’t remember writing, would you read them?”
“Maybe,” Chuck says. “Are they any good?”
“You wrote them, dude.”
“Yeah. I’m a hack.” He snorts. “Okay. Fine, I’ll read them.”
“Okay,” Charlie says. “Can we talk tomorrow?”
It’s a potentially dangerous move. Charlie knows that. Chuck could decide to run. But Charlie’s seen his house. She’s counting on procrastination and laziness and yeah, maybe a little bit of curiosity.
Chuck doesn’t take her up on a ride back to his house, which is fine with Charlie. She borrows someone’s WiFi to flip Chuck the files — to his Connor Allison email, which will probably surprise him. But Charlie knows he hasn’t logged into his Chuck Shurley or Carver Edlund emails in years.
Maybe he’s testing her, not telling her which email to use. That’s fine. Charlie’s testing him too.
* * *
The next morning, Charlie wakes early. She’s not feeling good, exactly, but she’s full of restless energy and needs to get out.
So she goes for a run. It’s flat, and she misses her reservoir. Misses running hills. She’s not using Run, Zombies, Run! today, but she starts pushing herself to sprint for short intervals anyway. When she’s flying down the cracked asphalt road, pumping her arms and pushing her legs, she feels almost normal.
And then, when her chest feels like it’s exploding and her legs feel like they’re dying, she slows down to a jog to recover, and then does it all over again.
On the way back, there’s a field with sheep. She didn’t notice it on the way out — probably sprinting. They’re dark brown, their wool overgrown and laden with a winter’s worth of dirt. They look like the opposite of the white, wooly cotton balls she’d expect sheep to look like.
They come over to look at her, and Charlie stops to say hello. She’s always been a city geek. She’s never seen sheep this close up.
And then a dog runs out, from the house, and starts barking. Charlie nods goodbye to the sheep. It’s time to keep running.
* * *
Charlie stops by the diner to pick up a cup of coffee for Chuck the next morning.
His junk car is still in the driveway. He’s walking distance to the diner and the Super Variety, which sells both booze and food. He probably doesn’t drive much.
Or he decided to run, and left the car behind.
Charlie knocks at the door. Takes a deep breath.
When Chuck opens the door, he’s wearing the same robe as the day before. His hair’s sticking up like he’s just gotten up.
“Crap,” he says, looking at Charlie. “You are real.”
Charlie hands over the coffee. “What did you expect?”
He opens the lid, studies it for a bit before shrugging and taking a sip. “I told you. Things got kind of hazy there. I thought maybe it was starting up again.”
“You thought I was an angel? Didn’t seem like you believed in all that.”
“Doesn’t mean they don’t believe in me.” Chuck looks up and down the street. “You’d better come in.”
Inside, the level of entropy is identical to the day before. No signs of packing. The stack of Marvey Brothers books Charlie moved is still on the floor, so Charlie perches at the edge of the couch.
Chuck sits down in his desk chair, holding the paper cup of coffee in front of himself like a votive offering.
“I know what you think,” he says, finally.
Charlie smiles. “Yeah?”
“You think it’s all real.”
And there it is — cutting to the heart of the matter. So you think a shitty series of books about the Apocalypse is real. How does that make you feel? Charlie doesn’t need Yahoo! Answers to know the diagnosis on that one.
“I wouldn’t say real,” Charlie says, after a bit. “Let’s say I adopted that as my working hypothesis.”
“You believe in it,” Chuck says, flatly. “Why?”
Charlie sits back on the couch, forgetting about the missing springs. “Because it feels right,” she admits, finally.
“Right? A world with angels and prophets and racist trucks feels right to you?”
“Not right,” Charlie says. “Yeah. Not right. It feels… accurate. Like something I’ve lived through.”
Chuck looks away, takes another sip of coffee. “I read through the rest of the books.”
“And?”
“And I don’t remember writing them,” he says. “You’re sure they’re me?”
“The computer’s sure,” Charlie says. “I told you it was a hypothesis. I’m testing it.”
Chuck goes to take another sip of coffee, but apparently he’s already finished it.
“Why do you care so much? What’s in it for you?”
Charlie looks away from him. Wishes she’d brought a coffee for herself. Or a Frappucino.
“There’s some stuff I don’t remember,” she says. “Stuff I always thought I would. Or decisions I don’t think I would have made.” The thing she does not think of. She lets her mind glance off it. That particular redirection has become second-nature. “I want some explanations.”
Chuck drains the last of his coffee. “So what was your plan?”
“My plan?”
“Coming here. If I couldn’t help you.”
Charlie doesn’t work in plans. She works in modules. Chunks of potential plans that she can reconfigure and work with, bits of preparation that allow her more freedom than a straight line. But she’s got the next module ready. “I think we can track down Bobby Singer.”
“So you do think it’s real.”
“I am keeping myself open to all possibilities,” Charlie says.
(Yeah, she thinks it’s real.)
“How exactly?” Chuck starts playing with the cup. “Not that I’m saying I believe you.”
Charlie looks at him. It looks like he read something in the later books — something he remembers. Sort of. And she wants to push him on what it was. But then, he wants to push her on the thing she does not think of.
“I did an analysis,” she says, instead. “You include a lot of time in there — three hours to Cleveland, eight hours to Denver, whatever. Eighteen hours out from Bobby’s place. So I did an analysis.”
It wasn’t an easy job, mainly because Charlie started with the assumption that a ’67 Impala Chevy being driven on secondary highways probably couldn’t get much above 60 miles per hour. But that assumption mapped Bobby’s place across three states. Once she backed out and took some samples between two known points, she realized that Dean, if he was real, was probably a crazy driver. Probably ran people off the road. Because he was pushing that car well above the speeds it was designed for.
With the correct speeds, all the references to Bobby’s place cohered — came together in a cluster in southeastern South Dakota.
“It’s not far from here,” Charlie says. “Somewhere in South Dakota.”
“I didn’t put any last names in the books,” Chuck says. “You want to go drive to South Dakota and start asking for some dude named Bobby?”
“It’s Singer Storage,” Charlie says. “I’m assuming it’s Bobby Singer. And we don’t have to ask. We can check property records.” (Normally she’d already have checked them, online, but some of the counties in South Dakota were unreasonably untrusting of the internet and apparently kept some of their records in paper copies only. And she’d struck out on the property tax records.)
“So you want to go to South Dakota, and what, start looking at chains of title?” He sees Charlie’s expression. “What? I wrote Sam and Dean for years. I know how they research.”
“You never wrote much about that side of it,” Charlie says.
“Yeah, well, maybe I know more than I wrote about.”
Charlie stares at him. Yeah. That’s why she’s here.
“So?” she asks. “Are you curious enough?”
* * *
Chuck’s not curious enough.
Charlie leaves him with her cell numbers — the real number and the Google Voice she keeps in reserve in case she needs to run.
Chuck says he’ll call, if he changes his mind. He says it like it’s a huge concession. Like maybe he’ll actually think about it.
Charlie knows he’s not going to call.