The doorbell rings again, and this time, it’s followed by a knock. Whoever it is, they know she’s home, because all the lights are on inside the house. She looks around for her phone to see if she’s missed a text. Maybe Henry was planning to stop by. But she left her phone upstairs on the charger.
A thought occurs to her. What if it’s Ruby? She’s out on parole now, and although she’s forbidden to leave Canada, her mother has always been crafty. And she can be very motivated when someone else has something she wants. Like husbands. And money.
The knocking stops. Paris keeps her ears perked, waiting for the doorbell to ring again. It doesn’t. Padding down the hallway to the front door, she finally looks out the peephole to see if she can at least catch a glimpse of who it might have been. But there’s no one there.
Feeling a little rattled, Paris heads back into the kitchen. She’d started cooking around six o’clock when her stomach began to rumble, and then got carried away—she’s knee-deep in it now. The song has changed to “Midnight Train to Georgia,” and she sings along softly with Gladys Knight. I’d rather live in his world than live without him in mine …
Something crashes outside, and she jumps. What the hell is going on? Is someone in the backyard? Are they trying to break in now?
In a panic, she reaches for the closest sharp object she can find: the cleaver she used to chop all the vegetables for the pancit. There’s a glare on the kitchen windows and patio doors from the overhead lights, preventing her from seeing anything in the backyard, so she flicks them all off before approaching the glass to see if there’s anyone outside.
A man appears at the patio door, and she screams, nearly dropping the cleaver. Whoever he is, he must have hopped the fence. He’s dressed in dark clothing, wearing a black ball cap with some kind of red insignia on it. She fumbles for the switch to the backyard lights, but it’s dark, and all she ends up doing is flicking the kitchen lights back on again. The face vanishes behind a reflection of white.
The man pounds on the patio door.
“Go away,” she says, as authoritatively as she can muster. “You are trespassing, and I’m going to call the police.”
But how can she call? Her fucking phone is all the way upstairs.
He pounds on the glass again, and her fingers finally find the lights for the backyard. She switches them on, and sees a tall Black man staring in at her.
“Come on, Joey,” Drew says, his voice muffled behind the glass. “Let me in.”
CHAPTER FORTY
Paris hasn’t had the wind physically knocked out of her since she was a child, but this feels almost the same. An emotional gut punch, right to the diaphragm, and now she can’t breathe.
There was a sci-fi action movie she and Drew had rented a long time ago called Timecop, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. It’s set in the future, where a cop is sent back to the past via time travel to prevent something bad from happening. She can’t remember the specific details of the plot now, but she does remember that the younger version of Jean-Claude cannot in any way touch the older version of Jean-Claude, or they’ll both explode into nothing, like a supernova. There was a line that was quoted throughout: The same matter cannot occupy the same space.
Joey Reyes and Paris Peralta cannot both be here. And yet, looking at Drew through the glass of her back patio doors, this is exactly what’s happening. Her mind flies through the possibilities of what she should do next.
Option one: She can pretend she’s not Joey and insist she doesn’t know this man. As stupid as it was, this was always her plan if she ever found herself confronted with her past. If you deny something over and over again, and for long enough, people might eventually believe you. It works for politicians. Bonus: You might even convince yourself it’s the truth.
Option two: She can call the police, say she has a stalker, and have him arrested for trespassing.
Option three: She can kill him.
But it’s too late for any of those. Drew is looking right at her, and she at him, and she knows that the mindfuck of the situation has got to be written all over her face. Maybe if she’d known he was coming, she would have had time to prepare, to practice her reaction. But that’s exactly why he didn’t call first, or text, or send an email. He needed her reaction to prove she was Joey. He needed to make sure she wouldn’t run.
The past is melding with the present. The truth is mixing with the lies. This is a supernova.
“Joey, I didn’t come all this way to fuck up your life,” Drew says through the glass. “If I was going to do that, I would have just called the cops. Come on, open the door.”