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The fake, polite smile Annabelle had previously plastered on her face quickly died

"You spent eightto nurse your father back to the land of the living, or should I say, out of the bottoht le day Now, it’s closer to thirty-five But you wouldn’t know that since the last tie, alo, the day he told you for the hundredth tiht of you Only that time he called you by your mother’s name and you s since run cold as she stood there listening to a coer tick off intimate facts about her life She stood a few feet away fro the strap of her backpack hanging froht her knuckles turned white

He sat calmly on the bench with his ankle propped up on the opposite knee, studying his cuticles

"You have acquaintances, not friends No one knows that your father is an alcoholic and you look so much like your mother you could have been twins You have affairs, not love There isn’t a man out there who couldwhat you’ve witnessed with your father You’ve slept with a total of four men and none of therew up in which was Manchester Township, Michigan, by the way Population: four-thousand-one-hundred-and-two"

The rage and the embarrassment Annabelle felt made her want to lash out at thisthe police, you psychotic fuck"

She turned, about toa blue campus security phone was exactly one block away

"You just filled out an application for a student loan totaling twenty-three thousand dollars, which is currently in the process of being denied by the Financial Aid department You have exactly two thousand and thirty six dollars in your bank account, the sum total of all that is left of your mother’s life insurance policy The bottoe"

The man watched her stop in her tracks and knew he had herhook, line, and sinker He hoped he would get a raise for this one

She stood with her back to theback tears She’d looked at her bank account every day for the past six ically quadruple in size She knew she wouldn’t have enough money for her last year, roo she could to stretch out the raphy supplies were expensive Annabelle filled out the financial aid forood would finally couy was from the Financial Aid department and that hy he knew so much about her But Annabelle was pretty certain it wasn’t a job requirement to know the sexual history of all the applicants

Annabelle was lost in thought, soer that knew entirely toojust a few feet away His ar her to jump in fear She was amazed by the way he was able to sneak up on her so quietly

He held a large manila envelope in front of her and spoke quietly into her ear

"There’s so information in here, Miss Parker Look it over I’ll be in touch"

Since she refused to take the envelope or anything else he round in front of her as he walked away She lost track of ti with fear She didn’t understand how someone could know so much information about her He had kno many men she slept with and about that awful day in her father’s kitchen when she left for college No one should know that information, and it scared the hell out of her that this man had so casually walked up to her in a public place and listed these things off the top of his head like it was no big deal

Annabelle quickly looked around to see if anyone was near before dropping to the ground, picking up the envelope, and shoving it in her backpack She had run the whole way back to her dor with apprehension at what could possibly be in the envelope and knowing that if that man already knew so e caain

Annabelle had unlocked her door with tre hands, sat down on the bed in her dor the contents on top of her bedspread At least fifty pictures slipped out and flopped down to the bed in a scattered pile She threw the envelope to the floor and picked up one of the pictures It was a black and white photo of her father Ahis arms behind his back while another ainst her father’s cheek

She threw that one down on the bed and picked up another, this one in color It showed her father walking down the steps of her old home, his face badly beaten One eye was black and blue, he had a split lip, a cut above his eyebrow, and a bandage over his nose that nified it was broken

Annabelle tossed that one aside and picked up yet another, and another, and another until she had looked through each and every picture They were all more or less the same Her father with his face beat to hell or her father looking scared to death while he talked with some man in a suit Each photo was dated, not one was a duplicate The earliest photo was one of her father exchanging money with the same man in a suit It was dated six months before her mother died

Annabelle had no idea what any of this was supposed to otten himself into or why she cared She shoved the pictures aside and grabbed the small note card that had fallen out with them Written in the middle of the card in block letters was a name: Anthony Capuano

Annabelle had flipped the card over, hoping for so else, but the back was blank She scra on her laptop She did a Google search for Anthony Capuano There were six-thousand-four-hundred-and-nineteen results