#faithmitchells

“You shoulda said somethin’ weeks ago, Faith.” Will clasps his hands atop his sleek, polished desk. It looks like it’s been freshly waxed, the desktop glossy like the surface of an impenetrably deep lake. “Why didn’t you come to me from the start?”

She shifts her gaze to the photograph laid out next to Will’s hands. “I didn’t think it was a big deal at first,” she says, her cheeks warm with shame. “It was little things at first. Flowers, random junk like buttons, pieces of jewelry. One time they—he?—left a scrap of stained cloth. It didn’t occur to me until he left the photograph that it might’ve been a piece of evidence.”

“You at least hang onto it?” Will asks, pushing his chair away from his desk and unfolding to his full height. He plucks up the photograph by one of its edges. Will says, “You recognized the crime scene.”

“My mom let me look at the casefile once,” Faith says, watching as Will gently, carefully slips the picture into a clear, labeled envelope. “I remembered the pattern of the wallpaper.”

Will sets the envelope back on his desk. “Tell me more about these gifts you been gettin’.”

“They’re nothing, really,” Faith says, feeling for some reason like she’s betraying a secret by talking about it with Will. “Like I said, it’s a bunch of junk. Except for the photo. And the torn scrap of fabric. I stuck them in a box and left them in my office at home.”

“They’re obviously not nothin’,” Will muses. “They mean somethin’ to your stalker.”