by Emily James
The elevator ride and walk down the hall to my parents’ apartment felt a bit like walking the plank. Or at least what walking the plank would have felt like if pirates had actually killed people that way. Shooting their prisoners or running them through with a sword was more efficient, granted, but if making them suffer before death had been a goal, I could see this as a good way to go.
“You’re not going to pass out on me, are you?” Mark asked. “It’d be a shame if you crushed the cheesecake after we brought it all the way here.”
Nancy, my go-to person for all things food-related, had baked and packaged the maple syrup cheesecake for me to bring to my parents. I’d wanted some way to display Sugarwood’s product, and TSA restrictions meant I couldn’t carry a bottle of maple syrup on the plane with me, and packing it in my luggage would have given me nightmares about broken bottles and ruined clothes. The cheesecake I’d been able to carry on and tuck under my seat on the plane.
I tried to move my lips into a smile for Mark’s sake, but I had a feeling it came out more like a crazed grimace. “I won’t pass out. My dad would see that as weakness.”
I did let Mark knock on the door, though. With the way my hands were shaking, I wasn’t sure I could safely hold the cheesecake in one hand or that I’d knock loud enough for them to even hear me.
Mark’s knuckles had barely hit the wood before the door swung open, almost like they’d been waiting even though we were a couple of minutes early. I wouldn’t have dared be late.
I’d seen my mom only a few weeks earlier. Today she had the worn-down look in her eyes that she only got when she was working a tough case that required too many “needless” battles for information and way too many cups of coffee. Cases usually energized my parents, but one of my mom’s pet peeves was having to fight to get information that should have been provided to her as normal operating procedure.
My dad stood slightly behind her. Same Armani suit, wrinkle-free even after a day at work, as if he’d changed it before we arrived. He actually might have. First impressions, according to my dad, were worth ten eloquent arguments. His clients didn’t set foot in the courtroom without him approving every element of their appearance.
But instead of a scowl, he wore a smile.
I blinked rapidly, but it wasn’t an illusion. The smile was still there.
He extended a hand to Mark, but I barely caught his greeting. My mom had promised to talk to him on my behalf. Maybe she’d succeeded. Maybe I’d been worried for nothing.
When he turned his gaze in my direction, it reminded me of sapphires, warm on the outside but hard to the touch.
He hadn’t forgiven me. But first impressions were everything, and this was the first time he’d met Mark—whose good reputation I was sure my mom had ensured proceeded him.
The table was already set with the food laid out. Anyone else might have been worried we’d be late and the meal would grow cold, but not my parents. Because I knew better than to be late. They’d raised me, after all.
I recognized the meal on the first bites of heirloom baby carrots and pommes aligot as coming from one of my parents’ favorite fine dining restaurants. Just like they never cleaned, and never repaired anything that broke, they also never cooked a meal. My mom had a shelf of cookbooks in the kitchen, suggesting she’d known her way around the kitchen at one time, but that time had long passed before I entered high school.
Hearing Ahanti’s name snapped me back to the conversation. It’d been a man’s voice. I couldn’t imagine Mark telling my parents that Ahanti had “dumped” me as a friend.
It sounded like my dad was telling the story of how Ahanti helped save my life when Peter tried to kill me.
My dad shifted his gaze in my direction again, and it took everything I had not to shrink under the force of it. It was the look he normally reserved for the prosecution after he finished a line of questioning with a witness. The one that said Only a fool would contradict me.
“Her mother and I understand that, after an experience like that, almost anyone would need time away. We’ve only ever wanted what’s best for her, and we’re glad you’ll be moving back to DC so she can return to her career.”
It was a statement packed with messages. The one for me said, If you come back, all will be forgiven and we’ll never speak of this again. The one for Mark was the kind of pressure my dad was so good at exerting—a subtle implication that if we didn’t come back, he’d be holding me back and sabotaging my life.
The worst of it was, my dad probably knew exactly what he was doing. My mom would have told him enough about my relationship with Mark for him to know that Mark would do much more than move partway across the country if it was what was best for me.
A little ball of heat formed in my chest. I imagined it growing until I could shoot fire like a dragon. “We haven’t decided whether we’re moving back or not. We both have careers we enjoy in Fair Haven, so it’s not a decision to be made lightly.”
“Nicole.” My mom rose to her feet. “Could you help me with the dessert?”
The expression that flickered across her face worked as well as a bucket of ice water in putting out my anger. It almost looked like sadness. I hadn’t considered before that the strained relationship I had with my dad might negatively affect my mom.
I gathered up the empty plates and followed her into the kitchen without argument.
I hadn’t been wrong in what I’d said, but I probably shouldn’t have said it. I could have told Mark later to ignore him, that it’d been my choice to move to Fair Haven, and that my career wasn’t any more or less important than his. “I’m sorry, Mom.”
My mom barely acknowledged. Apologies were another thing that weren’t done in our family.
She pulled a white paper bag from the refrigerator and tucked the leftovers back inside. As I’d expected, the logo for the upscale restaurant they liked was emblazoned across the bag. So upscale that they technically called it catering rather than takeout. My tastes had never been as fancy once I moved out on my own, even before Fair Haven. Ahanti and I used to order Chinese and sit on one of our couches to eat it straight out of the containers.
That was it!
Only the knife I held to cut the cheesecake kept me from fist pumping the air. I could go to the Chinese restaurant we always used to order from, place an order for delivery, and request to put a note inside before it went out. That’s how I could communicate with Ahanti.
4
I leaned forward, pretending I wanted a better look at the painting on the wall in front of me. In my Chinese-food note the night before, I’d asked Ahanti to meet us in the section of the National Gallery of Art where they displayed seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish works. I knew from past visits that it was never as busy as the special exhibits or any of the areas dedicated to the artwork by the Italian masters.
It was also the only place I could think of where we’d be hard to spot, have to go through a security checkpoint before we came in, and Ahanti would have a reasonable excuse for leaving her phone in her car. While phones weren’t prohibited, photography was for certain collections, and loud conversations were strongly frowned upon. Ahanti would have normally brought her phone anyway, but I’d suggested in my note that she conveniently forget it.
My cell phone beeped with a text notification. Maybe Ahanti had decided a text was worth the risk and wanted to meet somewhere else. I grabbed for my phone so fast I almost shot it out of my hands and across the room.
The message wasn’t from Ahanti. It was from Mandy. Since I’d helped her when a murder happened at her bed-and-breakfast last month, she’d insisted on being the one who watched Velma and Toby while Mark and I were out of town. My business partner, Russ, would have been the better choice since Mandy would probably spoil both dogs, but I hadn’t been able to find a way to tell Mandy that that wouldn’t have hurt her feelings.
Do I have to use the leather leashes? Mandy wrote. They’re ugly, and you have nicer purple and
blue ones.
I’d left two pages of instructions about the dogs in the hope that Mandy wouldn’t explode my phone with questions while I was gone. I should have known better. How the heck she’d ever found those colored leashes was beyond me. I’d set out the leather ones, and the last time I saw the nylon ones, they’d fallen behind the food bag.
If you don’t want to burn your hands, yes, I typed back.
I’d bought the pretty nylon leashes before I signed Velma up for obedience classes. At the very first introductory session, before we even brought our dogs with us, the instructor banned the kind of leashes I had because of how painful it could be if our dog yanked it through our hand.
I pocketed my phone again and moved on to the next painting.
Mark moved along with me. “How long past the meet time do we wait?”
I checked my watch. The meet time I’d written on my note passed ten minutes ago. Given DC-area traffic, ten minutes late wasn’t terrible. And we had no way of knowing what her appointments had been like for today. For all we knew, she’d had one she couldn’t reschedule or the one ahead ran long.
Ahanti came around a corner, and my shrug stalled out halfway up. I could tell the moment she spotted us because she veered sharply in our direction.
She walked straight into a hug. “Only you would think to hide a note in a bag of takeout.”
I didn’t have to be a lawyer or a police officer to identify the relief in her voice. It matched what I felt inside. I’d been right.
Then, just as quickly, I felt like a selfish jerk. I probably shouldn’t feel relieved that something was wrong rather than that she didn’t want to be my friend anymore, but I had to hope that whatever was wrong, we could fix. If she’d truly wanted to end our friendship, there’d have been nothing I could do.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “I’m not the only one who’s worried about you. I talked to Geoff when I got into town.”
There was a tremor in her hand as she brought it up to run through her hair. A matching shiver skittered over my skin. Ahanti’s hands never shook.
“I didn’t know any other way to keep him safe. Both of you safe.” She glanced back over her shoulder, like even now she expected someone to be watching or listening. “Two weeks ago, someone left a picture of Geoff and me on my desk in the back room. They’d burned out his face and wrote I love you more across the back.”
I leaned into Mark’s solid arm for support. “You broke up with Geoff to protect him.”
She nodded. “I did some reading about stalkers online, and a lot of what I saw made it sound like if whoever did this thought I belonged to him, he might hurt Geoff to save me from him, or some warped thinking like that.”
The sad part of my parents’ business was that we dealt with the perpetrators rather than the victims. I’d been on the defense counsel side of a couple stalking cases. Ahanti’s fears were justified. Stalkers could become violent to both the object of their obsession and anyone who stood between them and what they wanted from the person they were stalking.
They didn’t normally jump straight into this level of contact, though. They tended to escalate. It should have started with something much smaller.
Ahanti hadn’t told me about anything, either recently or back when we were neighbors. At least, not that I could recall. “Is this the first thing that’s happened that made you think you have a stalker?”
She drew in a long breath, and it came out shaky. “The other stuff seemed innocent. It was mostly little gifts left at the studio. I get thank-you cards from clients sometimes, when I’ve helped them cover up a scar or hide an old tattoo of an ex’s name. I didn’t think the gifts were weird even though the cards were a bit personal.” She made an I-don’t-get-it gesture. “You’ve been there. We spend hours, sometimes days, working with clients. It’s easy to feel connected after that amount of time. People share all kinds of personal details. It’s not the first time I had a client feel like we were friends or even ask me out.”
I bit the inside of my cheek. Crap. She had told me all that. She’d even shown me a couple of the cards. We’d thought it was harmless and sweet. At one point, we’d even thought some of them might be from Geoff. I should have known better. Me, of all people. “Was the photo the only thing that seemed threatening?”
Ahanti’s gaze dropped.
My hand clenched around Mark’s arm. The gesture was so out of character for her, as if she thought she’d done something wrong.
“Some of the more recent notes mentioned things he shouldn’t have known about. One sounded almost like something I’d written in an email to you. The other was something I was sure I’d only told Geoff in a phone call.”
That explained why she’d been too afraid to use her phone or computer to tell me what was going on. Her stalker seemed to have somehow tapped into her private communications. Since the stalker was sending things to the studio, that also explained why she’d been afraid to say anything while we were there. Right now, we had no idea how he accessed her private communications. He could have bugged her studio or hacked her email. Maybe both.
Unfortunately, if he was tech-savvy enough, he might have even hacked her phone or put a keystroke tracker on her computer. As technology progressed, criminals were progressing right along with it.
I took her hand to make sure I had her attention. “You know this isn’t your fault, right?”
She raised her shoulders in a noncommittal shrug. “I must have encouraged him somehow, or this wouldn’t be happening.”
It was a common misconception about stalking cases that didn’t involve a celebrity. Many people assumed that the victim led the perpetrator on in some way and was partly culpable for what was happening to them. Nothing could be further from the truth. And it didn’t help that, at times, some movies and books portrayed stalking behavior as romantic. When Twilight was a craze, I was never able to get past how creepy Edward’s behavior seemed. Even then, I’d seen too much of the dark side to ever be that innocent again. Since my parents never sheltered me, I don’t think I was ever really innocent, even as a child.
The fact that Ahanti would even think she was partly to blame reminded me of the case I’d been part of only a couple of weeks ago. Blaming the victim had eventually led to the victims becoming murderers themselves. “You’re no more to blame than a woman who’s been raped.”
She adjusted the strap of the bag she had slung across her chest. It reminded me of a soldier strapping on his weapon for battle. And it looked a lot more like the Ahanti I knew.
“So is there something I can do about it?” she asked.
Mark held his phone out to her. “First, I think you should call your fiancé.” He glanced at me. “He deserves to know what’s going on.”
He didn’t have to say it’s what I would want. I heard it, and Ahanti must have, too, because she accepted the phone from him.
“And then,” Mark said, “we’re going to the police.”
An hour and a half later, Ahanti and I sat in the nearest Metropolitan Police station. Because the stalker sent his “love notes” to Skin Canvas and that was in their jurisdiction, it seemed like as good a place as any to start.
By the time Ahanti had finished talking to Geoff and we’d taken her to buy a pay-as-you-go phone that the stalker wouldn’t know about, Mark was barely going to have time to make his appointment at the lab. I told him we’d be fine to wait by ourselves to talk to an officer.
After all, even I couldn’t get into too much trouble inside a police station. Not life-threatening trouble, anyway.
Ahanti and I waited in silence, the only break coming from another text. Mandy sent me a picture of a thick, raw-looking red line across a palm and the words you were right. She couldn’t say I hadn’t warned her.
Another five minutes passed, and Ahanti crossed and uncrossed her legs. “Maybe this isn’t a good idea. I’m going to be away from work for most of the day. If he’s watching my business, he’ll know somethin
g’s up.”
Once we reported this, that was our next hurdle. Some stalking victims refused to change anything about their life, seeing that as a victory for their harasser. Others wanted to take every precaution to protect themselves in case the stalker lashed out, including moving.
“For all he knows, you had a doctor’s appointment and forgot your phone. Or you felt sick and went home. Have you gotten anything at your apartment?”
Ahanti worried her bottom lip. “I don’t think so. It’s all come to Skin Canvas so far.”
“Then it’s likely he doesn’t know where you live.”
That was a bit of a stretch. He likely knew her building. He’d probably followed her on her walk home, but her building had a locking external door. You needed a key to get in or a resident had to buzz you in. Mark and I had gotten in the other day because one of my former neighbors recognized me and knew Ahanti and I were close. That meant it wasn’t impossible for someone to gain access who shouldn’t, but it would be hard, and Ahanti would have noticed if someone followed her right in and up to her floor.
We fell into silence. For the first time, I didn’t know what to say to Ahanti. All the things I’d planned to say, all the things I’d been looking forward to talking to her about, now seemed inappropriate for the situation.
Ahanti shot me a sideways glance, and the corners of her eyes crinkled like she had a smile inside that she wasn’t sure whether to let out or not either. “Mark’s nothing like Peter.”
I laugh-snorted. If she could compliment Mark and take a jab at my ex-boyfriend at the same time, maybe I shouldn’t have worried about what to say after all. It seemed like Ahanti wanted a bit of normal in the midst of it all. “That’s an understatement.”
“How’d it go with your dad?”
I held back a second snort. It was getting to be a bad habit I needed to quit. This time, though, I didn’t feel like adding a laugh to it. “He seemed to like Mark.”
