Eduardo's Arc

Chapter 30 of 60

Eduardo woke on the second morning and looked at the paper strip nailed to the wall. Two dates. His own handwriting. He drank water and stood in front of it a long time. The paper was thin. A gust from the broken window could tear it loose. A mouse could chew it. He could bump the stove and knock it down and no one would know what had been written before. One missing day would void the thirty. Guardian Noble had said so plainly. He needed proof that could not be lost. He walked the house and looked at what he had. Cracked walls. A sagging roof. Boards nailed over the windows from the inside. Nothing here was safe from wind or hands. He sat on the step and thought about the day a stranger had called Kiersten's phone by accident. He remembered how she held the phone out to him, how she said it was nothing, a wrong number. He remembered taking the phone from her hand. He remembered his own face in the window glass after, and how his eyes had looked black to him. He had made her prove a thing that could not be proved. He had torn her page every time she wrote it clean. He would not do that to himself now. He would not build a page a stranger could tear. He took the ledger and walked to the feed store before the sun cleared the trees. The old man was setting out sacks. Eduardo asked him for a favor. He said he wanted to bring the day's paper strip in each morning before work and copy it into a second book kept on the store shelf, signed by the old man's hand beside his own. The old man looked at him a long moment. Then he pulled a thin blue notebook from under the counter and slid it across. "Bring it every morning," the old man said. "Miss a morning and I mark the day empty. I won't lie for you." "I know," Eduardo said. "That's why I came." He wrote day one and day two into the blue book. The old man signed beside each date. Eduardo walked home lighter than he had come. The strip on his wall could still tear. The strip did not matter now. The blue book sat on a shelf he did not own, in a hand that was not his, under a name the town still trusted. He stood in front of the paper on his wall that night and wrote day three beneath the others. He signed it. Then he closed the ledger and set it on the stove. Twenty-seven mornings left. He knew now he could not carry them alone, and he had stopped trying to.