The young man followed only after I invited him.
He introduced himself as Jonah Vale, a nursing assistant who worked evenings at a rehabilitation center in northern New Jersey.
He was not Evelyn’s relative.
He had driven her to my house because he feared someone was following her.
Graham reached for Evelyn’s folder, but she held it behind her back.
“You had your chance to tell the truth,” she said.
He called her unstable and accused her of inventing a child to ruin him.
I noticed that he directed each sentence toward Natalie rather than his wife.
He wanted my wife to confirm his story.
Natalie stayed beside the stairs, gripping the banister.
“I don’t know what she told you,” Natalie whispered to me.
“Then stop standing beside him and tell me what you do know,” I said.
Evelyn handed me her phone.
The most recent message was a photograph of a girl standing outside a brick building under a broken streetlamp.
The girl’s hair was dark, her face narrow, and her left eyebrow crossed by a pale scar.
The timestamp was eleven minutes earlier.
Under the photograph appeared six words that made Graham lean against the wall.
“The woman from Tuesdays is here.”
I remembered last Tuesday.
Natalie had left the house around seven, saying she was driving her sister to a medical appointment.
At nine, someone knocked on my front door three slow times and twice quickly.
I had been in the shower, and by the time I reached the entrance the porch was empty.
A little later Natalie came home furious that I had left the curtains open.
Her reaction had confused me then.
I had mistaken it for irritation about privacy.
“Who is the woman from Tuesdays?” I asked.
Natalie closed her eyes.
Graham said the photograph was fake.
Jonah took one cautious step forward.
“I saw her last Tuesday,” he said.
“She entered the side gate at Saint Agnes, and a girl who had been waiting for her got into a silver car.”
Natalie shook her head so violently I thought she might fall.
“I didn’t take her anywhere,” she said.
“Nobody said you did,” Evelyn replied.
That was when I understood that Evelyn was not guessing.
She knew enough to separate what had happened from what she only feared.
I asked Graham to leave my bedroom and sit at the kitchen table like an adult.
He refused until Evelyn told him she had already sent a copy of the photograph to a lawyer.
