PART 2

I hurried downstairs and heard Dorothy’s weak voice behind the storage-room door.

The handle would not turn. I pushed against the old wood until the latch finally broke.

Dorothy sat on the floor beside several cardboard boxes, one hand resting on her ankle. An overturned stool lay nearby.

She had climbed up to reach a shelf, fallen, and become trapped when the door swung shut.

“Where is Alex?” I demanded.

“He went to the pharmacy.”

Before I could say more, the front door slammed upstairs. Alex’s footsteps raced through the house. When he appeared, his face went pale, and the pharmacy bag slipped from his hand.

He rushed toward Dorothy.

“I was gone for twenty minutes,” he said, his hands shaking.

“That was long enough,” I snapped.

I called the paramedics. While we waited, Alex placed a folded blanket beneath Dorothy’s leg and spoke softly to her.

“Stay with me, Dot. Help is coming.”

“I am not dying,” she muttered.

“I know.”

“Then stop looking at me that way.”

His expression tightened, and I realized he was fighting tears.

The paramedics confirmed that Dorothy had badly sprained her ankle but had not broken it. After they left, I turned toward Alex.

“What is happening here?”

He looked at Dorothy.

“She should tell you.”

I faced her.

“You stopped answering my calls. He has a key, you haven’t left the house, and the messages from your phone don’t sound like you.”

Dorothy lowered her eyes.

“They weren’t written by me.”

My stomach dropped.

Alex raised his hands.

“She asked me to send them.”

“Why?”

The package Alex had delivered a month earlier contained personal medical supplies. It had split open on her porch. Dorothy was embarrassed by her changing health and had been too ashamed to tell me.

She expected Alex to laugh.

Instead, he quietly gathered everything, carried it inside, and asked whether she needed help.

He noticed there was almost no food in her refrigerator. After work, he returned with food and later repaired several things around the house.

“So you fell in love with him?” I asked.

Dorothy smiled.

“Not the way you imagined. I love him like the grandson I never had.”

Alex’s mother had died when he was sixteen. His father disappeared soon afterward. Since then, he had moved between relatives, cheap rooms, and his car while working long hours making deliveries.

Dorothy discovered the truth after seeing his belongings piled in the back seat.

“I had three empty bedrooms,” she said. “He had nowhere safe to sleep.”

“So she let me stay,” Alex added.

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