Chapter 7: The Late-Night Call
The silence after Lisa’s breathing deepened was a physical thing, a thick velvet held taut over the room. Susanna counted to one hundred, then two hundred, each number a bead on a shaky mental string. The moonlight had shifted, no longer painting stripes but pooling in a single lame puddle on the floorboards.She moved like a minute hand, slow and incremental. The sheets hissed as she slid her legs free.The floorboards were icy under her bare feet. She avoided the one she knew would creak, a ghost navigating its own haunted house.The kitchen was a cave of deeper shadow. The rotary phone on the wall was an ancient, beige relic, its coiled cord hanging like a dead vine.Her finger found the dial in the dark. The numbers glowed in her mind: 7-3-4-555-0110.
Each rotation was a deafening, ratcheting grind in the stillness.It echoed. She pressed the receiver to her ear, her own breath loud in the cavern of the plastic.One ring.Two.A click. “Crisis and Support Line, this is Annette.” The voice was weathered but soft, a warm hand extended into a void.Susanna’s throat locked.She opened her mouth.Nothing.
“It’s okay,” Annette said.“You called. That’s enough for now.”
The words broke loose, a whispered rush. “I don’t know what’s real anymore.” She curled the cord around her finger, tight enough to sting.“She… she loves me. She says she does.But it feels like being eaten alive.” The confession, once started, became a torrent. The egg on the floor, the shower, the notebook on the counter, the photos on the fridge that were less a gallery and more a trophy wall. “I’m a person in her head, and I don’t match the one in here.” She tapped her own temple, a futile gesture the woman couldn’t see.
“You’re describing a very controlling situation,” Annette said, her tone neutral, a safe harbor. “That fear you’re feeling, it’s your intuition trying to—”
A floorboard groaned.Not from the bedroom.From the hallway.
Susanna’s blood turned to ice.She turned, the cord pulling taut.
Lisa stood in the kitchen doorway, backlit by the faint blue glow of the bathroom nightlight. She was just a silhouette, but Susanna could see the tilt of her head, the way her arms hung loose at her sides. She was perfectly still.
“Susanna?” Annette’s voice, tiny and far away, buzzed in the receiver.Lisa took a step forward.Then another. Her movements were fluid, unhurried.The predatory grace of something that knows the prey has nowhere left to run.
“I… I have to go,” Susanna whispered into the phone.“Is someone there with you? Are you safe—”
Susanna didn’t hang up.She simply let the receiver fall from her numb fingers. It swung on its cord, banging once, softly, against the cabinet door. Annette’s distant voice, a tiny, tinny insect, faded into the hum of the refrigerator.
Lisa closed the distance.She didn’t look at Susanna.She looked at the dangling receiver. With a slow, deliberate hand, she caught it and lifted it to her own ear. She listened for a second, her expression blank. Then, with a quiet, final click, she set the receiver back in its cradle.The sound was definitive.A period at the end of a sentence.
She turned her eyes to Susanna.In the near-dark, they were just bottomless pits.
“Can’t sleep?” Lisa asked.Her voice was normal.Casual. It was the most terrifying thing Susanna had ever heard.Susanna shook her head. She was trembling so violently her teeth wanted to chatter.“Me neither.” Lisa leaned back against the counter, crossing her arms. She nodded toward the phone.“Who was that?”
The lie wouldn’t come. Her mind was a field of ash.“Wrong number,” Susanna managed, the words barely audible.
“A wrong number at 3 a.m.? That’s a persistent caller.” Lisa pushed off from the counter and took the two steps to the fridge.She didn’t open it. She traced a finger over the surface, over one of the smudged, torn photographs of Susanna from years ago—Susanna laughing with a friend whose face Lisa had meticulously scratched away.“You sounded upset.Whispering. All that drama.” She sighed, a performance of weary concern. “You’re working yourself up again.Making up stories in your head. It’s what you do.”
She turned, her face now in a slash of moonlight.Her expression was one of pained understanding. “You think I’m the villain in your story, Susanna. But I’m the one cleaning up the egg you dropped.I’m the one listening to your sad pigeon poems. I’m here.” She spread her hands, indicating the dark apartment, their entire world. “Who were you really hoping would pick up?”
The accusation hung in the air, twisting the narrative. Suddenly, the call wasn’t a cry for help, but an act of betrayal.A secret whispered to a stranger.
Lisa stepped closer.She didn’t touch her. “You know what happens when you let people in.They take.They drain you.They leave.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I don’t leave. I’m the only one who doesn’t leave.”
Susanna felt the truth of it wrap around her ribs, a constricting vine.The world outside was a void. Lisa was the only solid thing, even if that solidity was a prison cell.
Lisa finally reached out, not to grip, but to gently brush a strand of hair from Susanna’s damp forehead.Her touch was chillingly tender.“Let’s go back to bed. This was just a bad dream.”
She led her, a compliant ghost, back through the dark apartment. As they passed the fridge, Lisa paused, her gaze lingering on the grid of photos. “Tomorrow,” she said softly, almost to herself, “we should rearrange these. The story’s getting messy.”
In bed, Lisa pulled Susanna close, wrapping herself around her, a possessive shield. Susanna lay rigid, staring into the dark. The number was still there in her mind, 7-3-4-555-0110, but it was no longer a lifeline.It was a curse. It was the thing that had finally, fully, proven Lisa right.
The outside world had offered a voice, and the voice had been answered by the silence of the cradle click. Lisa’s breath was warm on her neck. The warmth felt like the only truth left.