Chapter 3: Four Words and a Locked Door
I didn't sleep.
I sat on my kitchen floor with the photograph face-down on the linoleum and Rocco the velociraptor propped against the cabinet beside me, and I listened to my radiator try to die the way it always did, and I told myself David was just trying to frighten me.
That was what David did.
He frightened people and then he waited to see what they would do with the fear.
The problem was that it was working.
The photograph had been taken from across the street.
I could tell by the angle — slightly elevated, slightly compressed, the way phone cameras look when someone is standing at a distance and zooming in.
He had been watching me work.
He had been close enough to read the name on my uniform and far enough away that I had never once felt him there.
I turned the photo over.
Read the four words again.
*I never really left.*
I put it back face-down.
My phone showed 4:17 a.m.
I had Chloe's number.
I had my landlord's number.
I had the number for a crisis line I had called once, two years ago, when the debt David left behind had felt like something physical pressing on my chest.
What I did not have was anyone I could call at 4:17 in the morning and say: my ex-boyfriend has been photographing me outside work and I think he may have been watching me the entire time I believed he was gone.
I stood up.
Checked the lock on my front door.
Checked the window latch in the kitchen.
Checked the window in the single room I used as a bedroom.
Everything was locked.
Everything had always been locked.
I had been locking everything since the week David disappeared and I realized the person I most needed to be protected from had a key.
I had changed the locks that same week.
I had paid for it with money I didn't have.
I went back to the kitchen and made coffee because there was nothing else useful to do at 4:17 in the morning, and I was standing at the counter waiting for it to finish when my phone lit up.
Unknown number.
I stared at it through two full rings.
Then I answered.
"Hannah." David's voice was exactly the same.
Careful.
Warm at the edges, the way a room feels warm when someone has just left it.
"Don't hang up."
"How did you get this number?"
"I never deleted it."
"I changed it."
A pause.
"I know.
It took me a little while."
My hand tightened on the phone.
"What do you want?"
"I want to talk.
That's all.
I've been watching you — "
"I know you've been watching me.
You left me a photograph."
"I left you a message," he said, and his voice shifted slightly, the warmth dropping just a degree.
"Because you haven't been returning my calls.
Because you moved and didn't tell me.
Because you've been acting like I don't exist, Hannah, and I think we both know that isn't fair."
I set my coffee cup down very carefully on the counter.
"You took my savings.
You sold my grandmother's ring.
You left me with eleven thousand dollars of debt and no explanation."
"I left because I needed time."
"You left because you had taken everything there was to take."
The silence that followed was different from Matteo's silences.
Matteo's silences felt like a man deciding how much to say.
David's silence felt like a man deciding which version of the truth would be most useful.
"I saw you get into that car," he said finally.
"Last night.
Outside your building."
My chest went very still.
"Black car.
Very expensive.
Man who walked you to the door." Another pause.
"Do you know who that is, Hannah?
Do you understand what kind of people you're getting close to?"
"Don't."
"I'm trying to protect you."
"You photographed me from across the street at night and left it under my door.
That is not protection."
"I needed you to know I was here." His voice softened again, cycling back to warm.
"I needed you to know that someone is paying attention.
Someone who actually cares what happens to you."
I looked at the photograph still lying face-down on my kitchen floor.
"Don't contact me again," I said.
"Hannah — "
I ended the call.
I stood in my kitchen until the coffee finished brewing.
I poured a cup.
I drank half of it standing up.
Then I picked up the photograph, put it in the kitchen drawer under the takeout menus, and went to get two hours of sleep before my shift.
I did not call the police.
I had called the police once before, during the debt period, and the officer had looked at me with tired patience and explained that a man leaving a note was not a crjme.
I did not call Chloe because Chloe would panic in a way that would require me to manage her panic on top of my own.
I did not call Matteo De Luca because I had known him for less than forty-eight hours and I was not going to become the kind of woman who ran toward powerful men every time she was frightened.
I had already done that once.
I knew exactly where it ended.
May you like
What I did not know — what I could not have known lying there in the gray early-morning light with Rocco on the nightstand and stitches pulling across my back — was that David had already made a different call that night.
And the person he had called already knew my name.
