Watch Over Me

by Mila Gray

Zoey’s smile fades. “Yes,” she says. She hands me back the wheel and goes over to Kate, sitting down beside her. “I wanted to talk to you. Mom and I have been thinking that maybe we should stay here. Things are going well. Cole likes school. I have a good job. It seems like it makes sense.”

  Kate’s face transforms into a look of visceral hatred and fury. “For you!” she yells. “I hate it here.”

  Zoey’s jaw drops. “Wh-what?” she stammers. “I thought … I thought you liked it.”

  Kate rounds on her. “Well, I don’t. I hate it.” She’s shaking now. Her voice trembling with pent-up anger.

  Zoey’s as surprised as me at the outburst. “I don’t understand,” she says. “What’s going on?”

  Kate’s turned bright red, fury twisting her features. “What do you care?” she shouts. “All you care about is him.” She jerks her head in my direction.

  “That’s not true,” Zoey answers, her voice quiet and calm but holding a trace of frustration. “You know it isn’t.”

  Kate glares at her, then storms past, toward the stairs and down into the cabin. Zoey watches her leave in shock, then turns to look at me. I shrug blankly. I have no clue what that was about. Kate has always been a mystery to me. Maybe it has to do with the cat?

  Zoey goes after her, and I hear the sound of raised voices in the cabin below.

  “I did it!” Cole shouts. He’s been busy this whole time, sitting on deck by the mast, trying to tie the frayed piece of rope I gave him into a bowline.

  “Well done,” I tell him, half-distracted by the shouting coming from Kate inside the cabin. She’s yelling at Zoey to leave her alone.

  “Do I get ice cream now?” Cole asks, scampering across the deck.

  “Sure,” I tell him. “We’ll all get ice cream.”

  “Not Zoey,” he answers matter-of-factly.

  “Why not Zoey?” I ask.

  Cole shrugs. “She’s been bad. She doesn’t get ice cream.”

  I smile, confused. “What do you mean, she’s been bad?”

  Cole squints at me. “She’s a liar. Liars don’t get ice cream.”

  Astonished, I stare at him. “She’s not a liar,” I say. “What are you talking about?”

  Cole squats down and busies himself, untying the knot he just made. He murmurs something I can’t hear over the noise of the wind flapping the sail.

  “What did you just say?” I ask, aware of Zoey walking up the steps from the cabin behind me.

  Cole looks up, eyes flashing. “Zoey’s a lying bitch.”

  ZOEY

  Cole!” I say. “Where did you learn that word?”

  “But you are!” Cole hisses at me. “You’re a lying bitch.”

  Still reeling from my fight with Kate, I can only blink at Cole in shock, my heart hammering. He sounds like my dad, and the thought of it makes tears spring up.

  “Apologize,” Tristan says to Cole, his voice firm.

  “No!” Cole shouts. His eyes glint with defiance, and I can see just where this is going to lead, so I intervene.

  “Cole,” I say quietly, kneeling beside him, trying to get a grip on my emotions, “tell me why you think I’m a liar. What have I lied about?”

  “Everything,” he mutters, not meeting my eye.

  I don’t understand his accusation. “What do you mean, ‘everything’?”

  “My dad went to prison because of you. You lied.”

  “Who told you that?” I ask, my heart starting to race.

  Cole picks furiously at the knot in the rope. “Cole?” I press. He ignores me. I glance up at Tristan, feeling lost. Cole doesn’t know the details of what happened between our parents or the trial, so how could he know what my testimony was? Tristan stares at Cole in confusion too.

  “Your sister isn’t a liar,” he says, but Cole ignores him as well.

  “Cole,” I say, “it isn’t true. I didn’t lie. I’ve never lied. Who’s telling you otherwise?”

  His mouth purses even tighter, locking his secrets away so he doesn’t spill them. I need to prize them free, even though a horrifying thought has burst into my mind—the only person who would seed that idea into Cole is my father. But how would my father be in communication with him? Cole doesn’t have a phone or e-mail. There’s only one way. And that’s in person.

  “Cole,” I say. I take him by the shoulders when he refuses to look up at me, frustration and fear making me snap. “Cole,” I repeat, shaking him until he looks up at me, his eyes flashing furiously. “Have you seen Dad?” I demand.

  “No!” he spits, wriggling free and darting toward the stairs. He vanishes down inside the cabin, and I’m left squatting on the deck, feeling that the waves punching the side of the boat are punching me. I almost topple, and it’s Tristan who helps me stand, pulling me against his strong, broad chest.

  “Do you think he’s seen your dad?” he asks.

  My legs are shaking with more than just the unfamiliar motion of the waves. I know Cole, and I know he was lying when he said no. His answer came too fast, and he couldn’t look me in the eye.

  “Zoey?” Tristan presses.

  I nod. He’s seen our father.

  TRISTAN

  After work, I hurry to Zoey’s place and find Gina sitting at the table with Robert. She startles when I walk in and knocks over her cup of tea.

  “Sorry,” I say as Robert hurries to the kitchen for a towel to mop up the spill.

  “It’s fine,” says Gina. “I’m just a little jumpy these days.”

  Robert soaks up the spilled tea and then dabs at a little spot on Gina’s shirt. She smiles and blushes. Robert also blushes, and I do a double take. Okay, it’s like that, is it? I shake my head, wondering how I didn’t see it already, though it’s been staring me in the face. Robert’s been coming by every day or so to do odd jobs: finishing off the exterior paintwork and installing locks on the bedroom doors and the windows. At first I mistook his attentiveness for landlord diligence, but now I realize it’s something else. He certainly doesn’t come by my apartment every day to fix things. And he doesn’t bring me flowers, either, I think, eyeing the bunch of sunflowers on the table. Man’s got moves.

  Robert, in a crisply laundered blue shirt, thanks Gina for the tea and moves to the door, gesturing for me to follow. I do. Once outside, I turn to Robert, still grinning. “Nice shirt,” I say. “You never dress up for me, Robert.”

  Robert blushes all the way to the roots of his gray hair. “It’s not like that,” he mumbles. “Gina’s a lovely lady, and I don’t like to think of her ex-husband out there, making threats.”

  “Me neither.”

  We both turn serious, contemplating the unsettling feeling that the threat still exists and is hanging over them. I scan the parking lot and the street, thinking back to that almost-accident on the bike when Zoey thought she saw her father in the shadows. At the time I thought she was seeing things, fear making her imagination spin out of control, but now I think she really did see him. The thought that he has been here, spying on us the whole time, is beyond troubling. Mainly I worry for the times I’m not around, like now, when Zoey is at work. But along with worry, I feel anger—anger that he can do this to them, terrorize them like this.

  Ever since the boat trip, Cole has buttoned his lips and refused to say another word about his dad, despite Zoey’s pleas. We’ve tried to figure out how they’ve been in contact and have spoken to the school, the parole officer, and the mailman, but haven’t gotten any answers. We’ve checked Zoey’s phone, as well as her mom’s and Kate’s, to see if Cole has been using them to make calls or send texts, but we haven’t found anything suspicious.

  I rang the cops and spoke to someone, telling them that Zoey’s father was breaking the terms of his parole, but the cops told me I needed evidence if I was making a claim like that, proof that would stand up in court. That’s why I installed a camera by the front door, hidden in a hanging flower basket. If only we can get some footage of him at Zoey’s door, then we can
prove he’s broken the law, and he’ll go back to prison.

  Robert sighs and shakes his head. “I don’t know what else to do,” he says. He looks as frustrated as I feel. “What happens if either of us isn’t around?”

  I nod. It’s my worry too. Zoey’s also kept up with the self-defense classes. But none of it feels enough. It’s like battening down the hatches and filling sandbags, waiting for the hurricane to reach shore. There’s a sense that we can prepare all we like but there’s no knowing if any of it will make a blind bit of difference when the hurricane actually hits. Will keeps calling to check in, and I keep reassuring him that everything’s okay, that I’ve got it all under control and won’t let anything happen to his family in his absence, but it’s a huge promise to make, and his anxiety is rubbing off on me.

  I check the time. Zoey’s working tonight, but once she finishes it will be past midnight, which makes it officially the end of my thirty-day promise, which also makes it a month since we started dating. Zoey’s been teasing me about it, trying to push me to breaking the deal early, but I’ve held fast. It’s been hard, but worth it. Not just getting to know her on a level that’s more intimate than anything I’ve ever experienced with anyone before, but seeing her trust grow day by day too, along with her confidence.

  She now tells me exactly what she likes and doesn’t like, without any prodding on my part. I’ve been playing it cool about tonight to Zoey, making out like I could wait another thirty days no problem, but the truth is that I’m far from cool. On a scale of one to ten, I’m at about a fifteen.

  I’m nervous as hell too, more nervous even than I was before I lost my virginity. I’m worried that when it comes down to it, it won’t be all that—not for me, but for her. Big-game nerves.

  I have the evening to tidy the apartment, make the bed, shave, shower, and choose the right music, but it doesn’t feel like very much time to get ready, so I say a fast good-bye to Robert and run off home.

  A few minutes before midnight, apartment shipshape and smelling of cedarwood and sage—thanks to a candle that Dahlia gave me a while ago—I run to pick up Zoey from work. I won’t let her walk there or back here alone. She’s aiming to buy a car soon—tips are good at work, and she’s already set aside more than a thousand dollars for one. But even when she has a car, I’ll still be accompanying her, because there’s no way I could sleep in peace knowing her father is out there.

  After she received that first text message from her dad, she told me everything her father had done, all the names he called her and the threats he made in court. At the time she didn’t think he meant it when he threatened to kill her, and she still doesn’t fully believe it. But I’m not prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. He was in prison for three years for beating his wife almost to death, and he clearly didn’t have a come-to-Jesus moment sitting in his cell. It seems like instead he used those three years to tend to his resentment at the person who’d put him there. The question is, how far will he go to get revenge?

  But he’s an ex-cop, and he’s not stupid. He knows what he’s doing, and he’s being careful—and that suggests a man who isn’t acting in the heat of the moment. It suggests someone with a plan, someone willing to take his time, and that scares me a whole lot more.

  Zoey called the courthouse two weeks ago and asked for the file on her father’s case to be sent to her. I read her statement, taken just after the attack, and marveled at how she was only fifteen but sounded so much older. What struck me most was the prosecution’s argument that Zoey’s father was a sociopath of unusually high intelligence who had been drawn toward police work as it played into his idea of himself as superior to others. They brought an expert to the stand to give their opinion. I read it several times, feeling sicker with each rereading. He’s a man with a god complex who sees himself as the ultimate arbiter of justice, and who feels no empathy.

  As a result, when I step outside my apartment it’s with unusually heightened awareness, my ears pricked for every noise. I pause and scan the darkness for any unusual shadows, relying on that base animal instinct that’s always triggered whenever I sense danger. Those are the instincts we are trained to hone and to rely on in the military, but I also know that Zoey’s father will have much the same instincts. On top of that, he has the weight of years on me, three of them spent in prison, where, as a former cop, he must have become even more indomitable in order to survive.

  Not sensing anything out of the ordinary, I jog over to my bike. I pull on my helmet and notice a long, uneven scratch carved into the body from handlebars to exhaust. I crouch down to examine it, a string of curses erupting. Goddamn it. Someone used a key or a screwdriver to do this. They’ve gouged it with force—scoring through the paintwork to the metal. It’s going to cost a fortune to fix.

  I straighten fast, my neck prickling. It feels as if someone is watching me. Turning slowly, I scan the street for movement. Is someone out there? Did I imagine it? I realize I’m going to be late to get Zoey, so I get on the bike and turn the key in the ignition. The engine makes a loud clattering sound before a series of loud bangs makes me leap off. The engine gives out with a loud splutter. What the hell? I just had the bike serviced. It makes no sense … unless … Zoey’s dad’s done something to it. Maybe he’s sabotaged it somehow by putting something in the tank.

  I yank off my helmet and have to restrain myself from kicking the curb. Damn. I check the time again. I’m going to be late. A thought pushes through the silent rage in my head: Maybe that’s the point? Maybe he did this on purpose.…

  Before I can fully finish that thought, I’m running.

  ZOEY

  The restaurant is closed. Only the dishwasher and the manager, Tessa, and I are still here. I wait by the reception area, alternating between checking my phone to looking out the window. Where’s Tristan? He’s never late. I try calling again, but he doesn’t pick up. My skin feels prickly—as though spiders are crawling over me.

  I go to dial him again, but before I can, my phone rings, startling me. I look down at the display, expecting to see Tristan’s name pop up, but instead it says: UNDISCLOSED ID. My heart almost bursts out of my chest like the alien in that movie Tristan made me watch the other day. My finger hovers over the answer button, a voice in my head warning me not to pick up. I ignore the voice and put the phone to my ear. “Hello?”

  Silence.

  Then breathing.

  It’s him. I know it’s him.

  “I know it’s you,” I finally say, my voice coming out as a harsh and broken whisper.

  The breathing becomes heavier, as though he’s smothering laughter.

  “Leave me alone!” I hiss before hanging up.

  I gaze out at the dark street, willing Tristan to arrive. Where is he? The phone next to me on the reception desk suddenly rings, making me leap several feet away from it. I stare at it, frozen.

  “Can you get that?”

  It’s Tessa, sitting at the other end of the bar. I shake off my terror and reach for the phone, which seems to be trying to leap off the receiver and right into my hand.

  “Good evening, Riley’s,” I say, trying to keep my voice light.

  Silence. My stomach clenches tight as a fist.

  “Good evening, Zoey.”

  I open my mouth to draw in air, but my throat closes up and my lungs refuse to work. I can’t breathe. I grip the edge of the desk. “What do you want?” I hear myself ask my dad.

  A sound rumbles down the line. It takes me a few seconds to realize he’s laughing, a low, throaty noise that makes vomit leap up my throat.

  “Why do you look so scared, Zoey?”

  His words hit me like bullets. My head flies up. I stare out the window, but I can’t make anything out. It’s too dark. Another laugh rumbles down the phone. He’s out there, I think to myself. He’s watching me right now.

  “What do you want?” I manage to say again, fighting the urge to sink to the ground and take shelter behind the desk. Where is h
e?

  “I want three years of my life back,” he says, bitterness lacing his words. He sounds more than bitter, though. His words are loose, his tongue slurring the edges of them. He’s drunk. “You going to give them to me?” he demands.

  It’s not my fault, I want to say, but the words don’t come; they’re trapped in my throat.

  “Yeah, didn’t think so,” he mutters.

  My eyes strafe the street outside. There are a handful of cars—is he in one of them? Or hiding in the shadows of one of the storefronts opposite?

  “Three years is a long time, Zo-Zo,” he says, using my nickname from when I was a kid. “Long enough for me to think of how I’d pay you back for putting me inside.” He snorts. “My daughter, my own daughter, putting me away. Hard to believe. There’s a word for people like you where I come from. ‘Snitch.’ Know what happens to snitches in prison?”

  I have an idea.

  “You’re worse than your bitch mother,” he spits. He’s on a roll now. This is how it always goes with him. Once he gets going, it’s like a stopper removed from a bottle. I should hang up, but if I do it will only make him angrier, and what if he decides to come inside?

  I look over at Tessa, head bent over the books at the end of the bar, oblivious to what’s happening.

  “And you’re taking after her too, aren’t you? Becoming a slut, just like her.”

  I turn around so my back is facing the window and he can’t see my face. I want to hang up. I want to cover my ears and sink to the ground and crawl somewhere safe. I want to let out the horrified scream that is trapped inside. But I don’t do anything. I just stand there, frozen, and listen mutely as he continues speaking.

  “I’ve seen you with that man, in and out of his apartment at all hours.”

  Tristan. He’s talking about Tristan. He’s seen us together. He’s spying on me. Ice chills my veins.

  “Are you sleeping with him?” he asks.

  I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to block the horror of his voice.

  “He know what a slut you are?” he asks. Then he pauses for a beat before answering his own question. “Of course he does—that’s why he’s with you, always running after you like you’re a bitch in heat.…”