Chapter 8: Tillman Street
I was in the kitchen in thirty seconds.
Ethan was standing at the counter, phone to his ear, his face the color of old paper.
"Which hospital?" he said.
"Okay.
Okay, we're coming."
He hung up.
Looked at me.
"Marcus went back to her building last night," he said.
"He got inside somehow.
A neighbor heard shouting and called 911.
By the time they arrived, Dana was at the bottom of the stairwell."
My hand went to the counter.
"How bad?"
"Broken arm.
Possible concussion.
They're saying she fell, but—"
"She didn't fall."
"No," he said.
"I don't think she did either."
I called Carol before Ethan finished getting dressed.
She was at our door in four minutes, still in her coat over her pajamas, and she took one look at my face and said, "Go.
I've got them."
We drove to St.
Augustine's in silence.
Dana was in a room on the second floor, her right arm in a temporary cast, a bandage above her left eyebrow.
She looked very small in the hospital bed.
When she saw us come through the door, she started to cry — the quiet, exhausted kind, like she'd been holding it in for hours.
"I told them I fell," she said.
"I told the police I fell."
"Dana." I sat in the chair beside her bed.
"You don't have to protect him."
"He said if I told them what really happened, he'd make sure everyone found out about the pregnancy.
My family doesn't know.
My mother doesn't know." She pressed her good hand to her mouth.
"I can't—"
"Listen to me." I leaned forward.
"He is going to do this again.
Maybe to you.
Maybe to someone else.
The only way to stop him is to tell the truth."
"I'm scared."
"I know.
But you called the police last time and they came.
They'll come again.
And this time there's evidence." I glanced at the cast on her arm.
"This time it's not just a man standing outside a building."
She looked at Ethan.
He was standing near the door, his own cast visible, his expression steady and quiet.
"I'll stay," he said.
"If you want to talk to the detective, I'll stay in the room."
"Me too," I said.
Dana looked at both of us for a long moment.
Then she nodded.
The detective assigned to the case arrived within the hour.
A woman named Reyes, mid-forties, with a no-nonsense manner that softened slightly when she sat down across from Dana.
Ethan gave her Marcus's full name.
He told her about the phone call.
About the threat.
About the timing of his own accident.
Detective Reyes wrote everything down without expression.
When Ethan finished, she looked up.
"You should have called us four days ago," she said.
"I know," he said.
"Do it next time."
"There won't be a next time," I said.
Reyes looked at me.
Something shifted in her expression — not quite a smile, but close.
"No," she said.
"There won't."
Dana gave her statement.
All of it, this time.
The months of harassment.
The messages.
The night he'd gone through her phone.
The stairwell.
When she finished, she looked wrung out and somehow lighter at the same time.
Reyes closed her notebook.
"We'll have a warrant for his arrest by this afternoon."
After she left, the three of us sat in the room for a while without talking.
A nurse came in to check Dana's vitals.
Outside the window, the city was going about its morning.
"I'm sorry," Dana said finally.
"For all of this.
For texting you.
For dragging you into something that had nothing to do with you."
I looked at her.
"You texted me because you wanted me to know the truth."
"Yes."
"Then it had everything to do with me."
She looked down at her cast.
"What happens now?
Between you and Ethan, I mean.
You don't have to answer that."
I glanced at Ethan.
He was watching me carefully, the way he'd been watching me for days — not with hope exactly, but with a kind of patient attention, like a man who understood he had no right to expect anything and was prepared to wait anyway.
"We're working on it," I said.
It was the truest thing I could have said.
Marcus Vreeland was arrested at his apartment at 3:17 that afternoon.
Ethan got the call from Detective Reyes while we were driving home.
He listened, said thank you, and hung up.
He told me the news.
I nodded.
We drove the rest of the way in silence.
But it was a different kind of silence than the one we'd been living in all week.
May you like
Less like a wall.
More like two people sitting quietly in the same room, figuring out where to begin.
