Page 50 of Shameless Vows

Assurance Inc. Claims Department

Date of Incident: 14 October 2010

NYPD Case Number: #10331352

Officer: James Miller

Items Stolen:

iPhone 4S 64GB, white

Apparently, just prior to the chaos I descended into, my phone had been stolenandI filed an insurance claim—before which I had apparently filed a police report. I don’t remember any of that, but then again, this entire time period of college is gone like the wind from my memory.

Butthat email… especially given that I’d never opened it… that had to be something.

I’d gone to thepolice.

I don’t remember going to the police, but they obviously have a record of me going to them.

I have no idea if my stolen cell phone has anything to do with the missing chunk of time from that year, but I know for sure it has the potential to meansomething. Because amidst the chaos I can’t remember, I supposedly had that phone. Or at least, I hadaphone. Because my parents said I’d been in contact with them, and that means I must have had a phone.

I am suddenly a detective, and that email is my first real clue.

Later, there was a single email from Columbia informing me that I had been automatically withdrawn, and then it was nothing but a bunch of sales spam and random newsletters for more than six months before I got to the last message that came from the Corwick Royal email server.

To: Isla Reyes

From: Mail Delivery Subsystem

Subject Line: Delivery Status Notification (Failure) Message: Malachi, please call me.

Date: 15 July 2011

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

[email protected]

Technical details of permanent failure:

Reyesfam.umgcorp.com tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the server for the recipient domain corwickroyal.cw by [email protected].

The error that the other server returned was:

550 sender blocked

Sender blocked.

Despite all the things I forgot in the time that stretched between 2010 and 2011, that was something I would remember for the rest of my life. Because that was when I realized, after the most harrowing ordeal of my life—which I only knew about via hearsay from my parents’ hearsay from other people involved—and when I needed him most, Malachi had disappeared from my life forever.

And he didn’t just disappear.

Heblockedme.

And now, more than ten years later, it was clear that during the time missing from my memory, the things I did included what I did to him.

That was obviously the extent of the emails from him, and all the rest were ones I remembered after returning from my ordeal and re-enrolling in college. Due to whatever it was that I’d done, my parents insisted that I stay at home and take online classes because I’d lost their trust—and that was putting it lightly.

Based on all the knowledge I have now regarding all of this, I don’t blame them, and I don’t blame Malachi either.