Covet

| Swipe Left

"Hand me that wrench, would you?" Paul asked, his voice a gentle rumble that pulled me back to the present.

I blinked away the remnants of a flashback, the forest road, and the fear fading away as I focused on the task again.

"Sure." I said, clearing my throat. A shiver ran down my spine. I was beginning to question my own memory, my sanity. What if I hadn't hit a deer? What if it had been... "Damn it!" I muttered under my breath, scraping my knuckles against the sharp edge of the car's frame.

Paul took the wrench and examined my hand. "You're bleeding. Are you okay?"

"It's a scratch." And it was, but the truth was, today, flashbacks had been as often as reruns on the television. One moment I'd be going about my day, then next, I was back in the dark, seeing the flash of eyes followed by an impact and the sickening crunch of metal against... something.

"Look, Dana," Paul said, holding my gaze with a seriousness that demanded my attention. "Are you sure you are okay?"

His words struck a chord, tapping into the loneliness I'd been trying so hard to ignore since my arrival. For a moment, I considered confiding in him, telling him about the flashbacks, the gnawing uncertainty over what I'd hit, and the loneliness that enveloped Lucille's place. But how could I burden him with my problems when we'd met days before? How could I expect him to understand what I was going through when I couldn't even make sense of it myself?

"Thanks, Paul." I offered a weak smile. "I just need to focus. I'll see if Jenny needs a hand instead."

"Alright," he agreed. "But don't push yourself too hard, okay?"

I nodded and strolled back into the small office, where a stack of invoices cluttered Jenny's side of the desk. She appeared to ignore them with no intention of doing anything with them. It had taken less than an hour yesterday to become accustomed to our joint work ethic, which held an uneven balance of power in her direction. But I didn't mind. Work, like study, kept my mind occupied and provided a respite from real-world problems. During long summer nights, with the window cranked open, I listened to the crickets and katydids outside our apartment while throwing myself into my student art blog. It beat sitting idle waiting on Antoine's nightly message.

For the next few hours of the day, I sifted through, stamping any that were now overdue for payment. Looking out of the window, I lost myself to the warm glare reflected by the sun on the glass on my face—that was all it took for it to find me again. I flinched, bracing for imaginary impact; my heart beating harder in my chest.

"You okay, Dana," Paul said from across the room. He wiped oily hands on a used rag, a sympathetic smile tugging on his lips.

These flashbacks must be written all over my face. Embarrassed, I gave him a quick nod before redirecting my gaze back at a set of purple slips with checking account information on them. I counted twenty. All showed different customer names. Rather than an invoice to pay, these showed payments made out instead.

"Jenny, who is Dr. P Ravindran?" The name was on faint gray lettering, most likely a carbon-embossed copy of the original. "

"Dude's dead," she said, flicking over a page in the novel she was reading. "Swipe left if I were you."

"When?" I pressed. "I'm not on Tinder."

She shrugged and continued, but the last payment to the Doctor was only last month. I gathered the purple slips and stashed them in my bottom drawer to query Luke. I had retrieved them at the back of the filing room, nowhere near the purple crate. Debt was as familiar to me as zits before my period. Unaccounted expenditures would see Luke and Paul fall into the same hole I had.