Indigo(4)

Breathing in the delicious aromas from the bag, she began to close her door only to be interrupted by another loud knock. Nora turned to find Shelby Coughlin waiting on her threshold.

“I saw the delivery guy!” Shelby said happily, slipping inside. “So hungry!”

“Me, too.” Nora closed the door. “Ravenous.”

“You’d better have remembered the beer!”

“I acquired the beer as instructed, Your Majesty,” Nora said archly.

“Well done, lowly creature,” Shelby replied, playing along. “Although I still object to the delivery thing. The whole point of going to the Lotus for Chinese food is that they make it fresh. If we get it delivered—”

“Y’know, you keep using that word, but I don’t think it means what you think it means.”

Shelby smiled as Nora carried the brown bag into the galley kitchen. “Which word is that, Inigo Montoya?”

“We.”

“Yes, okay, you have been buying the Chinese food lately, and I’m deeply grateful. But it’s practically on your way home, right?”

Nora sighed. “Fine. Next week, I promise I will go and pick it up myself. But you are bringing the beer.”

Shelby grinned. “You are my hero. Really.”

“You’re lucky you’re my favorite person.”

“Am I really your favorite person?”

Nora opened the bag of Chinese food. “Absolutely. If you liked cats, I would give you all of mine.”

Shelby tied her long red-and-gold mane back with an elastic and took plates down from Nora’s cabinet. “You hate your cats,” Shelby said drily. “I don’t hate cats, but I don’t want your cats.”

They put the food out on the coffee table and then did battle with the cats to keep them away from the spread. Shelby turned off the TV and opened Nora’s laptop, choosing the eighties alt-rock channel that Shelby herself had set up on Pandora radio. They’d known each other less than eighteen months, but the girl from Atlanta had been making herself at home since day one. Every time, Nora surprised herself by finding it endearing instead of intrusive. If anyone else behaved as presumptuously in her home as Shelby did, Nora would never stand for it, but whenever Shelby swept into the apartment and took over Nora’s life, it never seemed to be selfish.

“I was watching that,” Nora said, mostly because she felt that she should issue some sort of protest.

“Not really.” Shelby settled beside Nora on the sofa and nudged Red away from the edge of the coffee table. “You just like having the TV for company, and now you’ve got actual company, not to mention food and beer and music.”

Nora wanted to argue, but she couldn’t fight the truth. Instead, she ate her kung pao shrimp and listened to Shelby detail every hour of her day, from the aggravating old-school condescension of her boss at the fashion-design company where she worked, to the constant efforts of her ex-boyfriend to get back into her good graces. Twenty-five-year-old Shelby had too much ambition to let either man get in her way, but somehow she couldn’t help letting them under her skin.

They shared their frustrations over the building’s unreliable hot-water heater and the landlord’s delays in getting it repaired. Shelby lived on the top floor—the fifth—and had taken to showering right before bed, when the hot water was less likely to run out so quickly. But as Nora chimed in, she found her friend studying her a little more intently than usual and stopped midsentence.

“What?”

“I read your piece about the girl’s memorial today. You doing all right?”

Nora dished some more rice onto her plate, letting it soak up some of the spicy kung pao sauce. She picked up her beer bottle and held it. “I’ll be okay when they catch whoever’s doing it.”

Shelby took a swig of her own beer and looked around the room. “You’ve got a lot of lights on in here. All the lights, really. I noticed it right off, but didn’t want to ask.”

“And now that you’ve had half a beer, you’re ready to ask?”

“Something like that.”

Nora glanced around and saw that Shelby was right. Without even realizing it, as night had fallen, Nora had turned on every light in the apartment, including the little buzzing fluorescent bar above the kitchen sink and the string of white Christmas lights that stayed stapled above her picture window year-round.

“Just keeping the darkness at bay, I guess.”

“Well then, I’m glad I’m here.”

“Me, too.” Nora was tempted to say more, but how could she explain without revealing at least some of her secrets? If she tried, she knew she’d end up spilling the whole story. She trusted Shelby, but the woman was so intent on helping that Nora feared what she might do with the truth. Eventually, it would get her hurt.

Nora couldn’t have that, so she kept her concerns to herself.

She didn’t explain that the shadows were starting to worry her, that whenever she wasn’t exerting her control over them, she could not escape the feeling that they bore her some profound ill will.

A buzzing sound made her jump, and she felt foolish when she realized it was only the vibration of her cell against the coffee table. Swallowing a mouthful of food, she reached for the phone. Shelby and the cats gave her an array of reproachful looks, but she glanced at the screen and saw that it was Rajitha Perera, her editor at NYChronicle.