The Game by Vi Keeland by Vi Keeland

6:45 – E train to Battery Park City. Enters Stuyvesant High School.

3:15 – E train back to 42nd Street. PS 212. Picks up a boy, approximately five years old.

The hair on my arms stood up. Holy shit. It’s no coincidence. This is about me. My father had followed me? It felt like the breath had been knocked out of my lungs. PS 212 was where Wyatt went to elementary school, and I often picked him up.

Written underneath that entry was a sentence underlined twice.

Does she have a child?

It dawned on me that if I was picking up Wyatt, this journal entry had been written after my mother died. That timing freaked me out even more than the fact that he’d followed me. I flipped back to the cover to check the year, but the gold numbers had been worn away, like so many of the others. So I went back to reading…

3:35 – Enters American Folk Art Museum with boy.

6:00 – Exits museum. Walks to Covenant House on 41st. Still with boy.

I actually remembered that particular day. Talia had gotten a new job, so I’d started picking Wyatt up from school every afternoon. Even though the shelter we lived at allowed kids, it wasn’t the best place for them. So I tried to minimize the amount of time we spent there. The shelter had student passes that no one ever used to get into any New York City museum for free, and I thought it would be fun to hit them all. I’d made a list of all 145 museums in the city, and every day Wyatt and I went to a different one. That day, I’d thought he’d probably be bored at the Folk Art Museum, but it turned out they had an exhibit on talismans, and we stayed until the museum closed at six—the time written in my father’s planner.

The planner had a few more entries for the day, the last of which was me coming back to the shelter at eleven PM after spending a few hours studying at the library. At the bottom of the page, there was an area for notes, with some blank lines. Two sentences were scribbled:

She’s the spitting image of her mother. Doesn’t smile much, except when she’s with the boy.

What the fuck?





CHAPTER 9




* * *



CHRISTIAN



The next morning, I spotted Bella sitting alone at a table in the hotel lobby next to the free coffee on my way back from the gym.

“I’ve been thinking…” I pulled out the chair across from her, spun it around, and sat backward. “What if you made one of those prediction models you like so much, and let it figure out who you should go out with? You know, feed it the facts about me and Bozo and see who it thinks you’d have a better time with. Put in the essentials.” I curled one arm and flexed to show her my muscles, which of course were newly plumped from my workout. “Like bicep size, sprint time, ability to travel on your schedule…”

I’d expected a laugh, or at a minimum an eyeroll, but instead Bella just stared. Her eyes were pointed in my direction, but it seemed like she wasn’t seeing me.

“Bella? You okay?”

She blinked a few times. “Yeah. Sorry. I didn’t get much sleep last night.”

I grinned. “Me sleeping so close got to you, huh?”

She shook her head. “I read one of my father’s daily planners.”

I sat back. “Shit. Did it upset you?”

“No, not upset, I guess. But it left me really confused. He followed me.”

“What do you mean he followed you? When?”

“Not long after my mother died.”

“You mean he had a private investigator find you?”

“No. He followed me himself—watched me going into and out of the shelter I stayed at for a while. He sort of logged what I did each day, and sometimes wrote a thought or two down. Oh, and I think he might have also built me a library.”

“Come again?”

She sipped her coffee. “When I first lived at Covenant House, I went to the library most nights because there weren’t any quiet places to study at the shelter. I usually stayed there until they closed and then sat on the steps and read for a while. The walk home wasn’t fun because I’d often get harassed by addicts and homeless people who hung out around Times Square. On one of the days John followed me home, he wrote in the notes section of his daily calendar, Need a closer library—unsafe. A few days later, he had an appointment on his schedule to go see a building three doors down from the shelter—the building that was turned into the Covenant Annex Library. I think it opened about two months after I moved into the shelter. It was basically a few rooms of books and a big, quiet area with comfortable couches to study. I loved that place. There weren’t many people who used it, so it was like having my own private building to do my homework and hang out. Last night I googled the library and found an article that said it was funded by an anonymous donation. I think it might have been John Barrett because he didn’t like me walking home late at night.”

“Are you kidding?”

She sighed. “Nope. For the last few years, I’ve been wondering when he found out about me. If he knew I existed when I was fifteen and cared enough to follow me around and build me a safe place to spend time, why didn’t he tell me who he was when he was alive?”

That was a damn good question. The John Barrett I knew was a stand-up guy, not one who let a fifteen-year-old live in a shelter. I could almost understand if he’d had an affair and didn’t want to acknowledge a child because it would hurt his marriage. But his wife, Celeste, had died a long time ago.