Read Stay With Me for Free Online Page B

. . .
    Maybe, if Brenna was lucky, she wouldn’t dream about anything at all.
    Brenna trudged up the stairs. She felt very tired. She was glad, though, for the way her breath and footsteps echoed, the way neighbors’ doors stayed closed. Brenna was going to make it all the way back to her apartment without having to speak to anyone, and that was about as good as she could ask for today.
    Once she was a few steps away from her door, though, she noticed the bag.
    Brenna sighed. Sometimes her upstairs neighbor would search for his keys on her floor, leaving personal items behind. Really, Mr. Ericson? A bag of groceries?
    She peered into the brown paper bag—not groceries. Clothes and . . . other things . . .
    Brenna slipped the clothes out of the bag—an old pair of girls’ blue jeans. Pink tennis socks. A red T-shirt—but pale and tired, as though it had been put in a time capsule that wasn’t entirely airtight.
    As she placed the T-shirt on top of the pants, Brenna saw the words on the front, the cracked black and yellow letters:
    “Elvis Costello and the Attractions. My Aim Is True.”
    Brenna’s breath caught in her chest. Her hands started to shake.
    It couldn’t be .
    Quickly, she pulled the rest of the items out of the bag: A pink and white hair band. A purple Swatch watch, a portable sewing kit, a traveler’s map of the U.S. . . .
    A faded denim jacket with black lace sewn into the sleeves. Oh my God . Brenna knew this jacket like she knew the shirt. Better than the shirt.
    Brenna had begged to borrow it for her sixth grade dance . . .
    No way, weirdo. You’ll spill punch on it, and then I’ll have to kill you.
    This was a joke. A strange, sick joke and it couldn’t be. Not after all these years. Who had put this here? Where had it come from? Brenna said it out loud. “Who put this bag here?” Her voice echoing, the walls closing in . . .
    But it could. It was . From the bottom of the bag, Brenna removed the final proof, as dull and faded as the past it came out of. “ Who put this here? ” said Brenna, louder this time, her voice shrill and hurt.
    In her hands, Brenna held the driver’s license of seventeen-year-old Clea Marie Spector, the expiration date: Clea’s birthday, 1991.

 
    3
    The grocery bag read “Alpha Beta.” Not a store that Brenna was familiar with—and, as she soon found out when she brought it into her apartment and Googled the name, not one that still existed. A West Coast chain, Alpha Beta had folded in 1995. The bag was a relic, along with everything inside it.
    Brenna needed answers. Bags of twenty-eight-year-old clothes from long-defunct grocery stores more than a thousand miles away didn’t get into locked buildings on their own. Someone had to have seen something, heard something. Someone had to have let this person in.
    Brenna hurried back down the stairs. The idea was to start at the bottom of the building, work her way up, but when she got down to Mrs. Dinnerstein’s apartment on the first floor, she found the door cracked open, the old woman peering warily out.
    “You didn’t need to shout,” said Mrs. Dinnerstein, whose first name was Ina. Brenna knew this, not because she’d ever introduced herself, but because on February 8, 2005, Brenna had accidentally received a piece of Mrs. Dinnerstein’s mail—an “urgent and personal” letter from Macy’s credit department, addressed to Ina R. Dinnerstein, that she’d slipped under her downstairs neighbor’s door without comment.
    “Honestly,” Mrs. Dinnerstein said. “It’s really inconsiderate.” Her voice was barely above a whisper, but still, there was a scolding in it.
    A dim lamplight shone behind her, weaving through her thin white hair, making it glow a little. Brenna had lived and worked in this building for nearly seven years. In that entire time, this lamplight was the most she’d ever seen of the inside of Mrs. Dinnerstein’s apartment.
    Such a dark place to live . The thought