The note was written in purple ink on a page torn from a spiral notebook, and by the time I reached Dakota’s front steps I had crushed it into a ball in my fist.
I could hear Tony behind me in the street.
“Jennifer! Jen, wait. Please.”
I didn’t wait. I didn’t look back. I walked up her three concrete steps, past the pot of yellow mums she’d set out the week she moved in, and I stood in front of her red door with my heart pounding so hard I could feel it in my ears.
I was fifty-one years old. I had never in my life knocked on a stranger’s door to start a fight.
I raised my hand. It was shaking.
I knocked anyway.
To understand why I was standing there, you need to know about the coffee. And to understand why that note hit me the way it did, you need to know about the twenty-five years before the coffee. I’ll tell you both. But I’ll start with the easy part, because for a while, that’s all it was. Easy. Almost funny.
Dakota moved into the house across the street at the end of August.
It was the little gray rambler that had belonged to old Mr. Petrakis for forty years, until his kids moved him to assisted living in the spring and put the house on the market. Tony and I watched the moving truck pull up from our front porch, drinking iced tea, the way people in our neighborhood watched everything. Maple Court is a small street. Eleven houses in a horseshoe. Everybody knows everybody’s business, and what they don’t know, they make up.
The movers carried in a couch, a drafting table, a few boxes, a bed. That was about it. Then a young woman got out of a little blue Honda with Arizona plates. Late twenties, maybe. Thin. Dark hair pulled back under a knit beanie, even though it was eighty-five degrees. She stood on the sidewalk for a long time, looking at the house. Then she turned around and looked at ours.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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