Bonus Epilogue
MAREN
The hospital reeks of antiseptic and other people’s worst days.
Six years into this career and I have never fully acclimated to it, which my attending told me during residency was a promising sign. Apparently, the day you cease noticing is the day you’ve stopped caring.
I push through the exit doors into the parking lot, and the night air hits my face like a slap I didn’t know I needed.
Different out here. It smells of rain and freedom. The relief of being outside.
The shift was rough. Not the roughest I’ve had — I keep a private ranking, and tonight doesn’t crack the top ten.
But there was a delivery that turned into an emergency that turned into four hours in a room where every decision was life or death, and now I’m standing in a vacant parking lot past midnight with my feet throbbing inside my shoes and my brain operating at approximately twenty percent capacity.
And underneath all of it, humming at a frequency that’s been running nonstop for weeks, is Landon Webb.
He showed up outside the hospital twelve days ago.
I recognized him from the handful of times I’d seen him with Ellie — the pleasant face, the expensive jacket, that easy smile he wears like a costume.
He asked where she was. Framed it as concern, which almost made me laugh.
I just want to make sure she’s okay, Maren.
I care about her . As though years of friendship hadn’t furnished me with enough material to compose a deeply unflattering biography of the man.
So, I told him what I’d practiced: that I hadn’t seen Ellie in person for months. That we texted occasionally and she seemed fine. The truth, carefully measured and precisely served. Then I walked to my car and sat behind the wheel for ten minutes before my hands agreed to stop shaking.
It was a gamble. Confronting a man like Landon directly, handing him information, even carefully managed — I knew what I was doing. But it seems to have worked, because the crawling awareness of being watched that had been following me around for days faded over the next week.
Until tonight.
I’m halfway across the parking lot when the sensation arrives, sudden and absolute. The hair on the back of my neck stands up, and my nervous system decides something is very wrong and that it would very much like to be taken seriously.
I keep walking. I don’t glance around.
But my body knows. Whatever part of me that still remembers what it was to be prey on an open plain, it’s awake now, and it’s paying attention.
“Maren.”
I spin, pulse spiking. But it’s just Greg.
He’s jogging slightly to close the distance, breath fogging in the December air. He works the obstetrics ward with me three shifts a week, asked me to dinner six weeks ago, and still hasn’t fully processed the word no .
“Didn’t see you leave,” he says, falling into step beside me.
Of course you didn’t. I walked right past you while you were glued to your phone.
“I slipped out quietly,” I say instead.
“Rough shift?”
“Very.”
He smiles. It’s a perfectly good smile, and that’s the frustrating thing about Greg.
On paper, by every measure that should matter, the man checks every box.
Nice jaw, solid build, easy on the eyes.
And yet, every conversation with him generates in me a mild but unshakeable sensation of tedium, as though someone has set my internal frequency to a channel he can’t reach.
I’ve been handling my life solo for three years now, and the bar for changing that is a lot higher than good bone structure and an inability to take a hint.
“A few of us are heading to Keegan’s,” he says. “Post-shift drinks. You should come.”
“I’m spent, Greg.”
“One drink?—”
“Maybe next time.” I give him a smile that means this conversation is over , and he reads it — mostly. He nods, says sure, yeah , and peels off toward the east side of the lot.
I turn back to my bag.
My keys are not in it.
I unzip the front pocket. The side pocket.
The main compartment. I hold the bag open under the parking lot lamp and peer directly into its contents.
No keys. The keychain is not easily overlooked.
It has blue rhinestone initials, ML , which Ellie informed me for six consecutive months were irredeemably tacky and which I retained on the grounds that I enjoyed them and it was my keychain.
I let out a slow breath.
I turn back toward the building. They’re in there somewhere — sitting on a counter or buried in my locker — and I’m going to have to drag my aching body back inside to find them, which is fine.
Totally fine. I’m exhausted, and my feet have filed a formal complaint, and every molecule in my body is begging me to lie down, but it’s fine.
I take three steps between the rows of cars and freeze when I hear something.
Not loud. Somewhere between a footstep and a shift of weight — the kind of sound a body makes when it settles into a position it’s been holding for a while.
The back of my neck lights up like a warning flare.
I go completely still.
“Hello?” My voice comes out steadier than the rest of me feels. “Anyone there?”
Nothing.
I turn slowly, scanning the gaps between cars, the shadows pooling between them, the dark edges where the overhead lights give up trying.
Nothing moves. No one appears. But the feeling doesn’t fade.
If anything, it gets worse, pressing against my skin like a shift in air pressure, and I know with a certainty that tightens my throat: This is nothing like Landon’s people.
His surveillance was identifiable — a sedan parked too long, a figure loitering outside the coffee shop across the street.
Amateur hour, honestly. This is something else entirely.
This presence has no edges I can find, no source I can point to, and yet, it doesn’t feel random.
It feels focused. Concentrated. Like someone has taken all the attention in this parking lot and aimed it at a single point.
Me.
I make myself look toward where the sound came from.
Near my car.
On the asphalt beside the driver’s door, catching the fluorescent light, is something blue. My keychain.
I stare at it .
You dropped them. That’s the explanation. I was distracted when Greg popped up, the keys were in my hand, they slipped and I didn’t notice because I was busy being politely dismissive. That’s what happened. That is definitely, absolutely, one hundred percent what happened.
I walk over, crouch down, and pick them up.
They’re warm.
I close my fist around them and walk to my car without looking back. I get in. Lock the doors. Sit there for a heavy moment, staring at my own knuckles wrapped around a keychain that someone else touched, and then I make myself start the engine.
The drive home usually takes ten minutes. Tonight it feels like an hour — every block stretching, every red light lasting a small eternity while I check the rearview mirror for headlights keeping a consistent distance.
I run every yellow signal without apology.
My apartment is on the third floor of a building in Logan Square that I picked for its good bones, a fire escape I use as a balcony in summer, and a landlord who actually fixes things when you ask — which, in Chicago, is basically a miracle.
I park, take the stairs, lock both deadbolts behind me, and stand in my own hallway for a moment just.. . breathing.
The feeling, I notice, is gone. Whatever was in that parking lot didn’t follow me here.
Or they were here first.
The thought pops up and I shove it right back down.
I go to the bathroom and peel off the scrubs that have absorbed an entire day’s worth of tiny emergencies. I crank the shower as hot as it goes and stand under it until the water starts to cool and my muscles finally wave the white flag .
I towel off and grab the oversized sweatshirt that’s been my unofficial pajama uniform for two years.
It smells different.
Not bad — not like a stranger, not like cologne or chemicals or anything I can flag as wrong. Just... not the way I left it. Cleaner. As though someone folded it and placed it back on the hook with more care than I have ever once applied to that sweatshirt in its entire life.
I press it to my face and breathe in, searching for something I can name, and catch the faintest trace of — cedar? Something dark and woody that doesn’t belong to my laundry detergent or anything I own.
I lower the sweatshirt. I put it on anyway.
It’s when I get to the kitchen that I remember.
I haven’t gone grocery shopping. Haven’t managed it in two weeks. My fridge almost certainly contains one sad container of old pad thai and maybe — maybe — a lime. Delivery at 2:00 a.m. on a Tuesday? Not happening. My options have narrowed to eating the lime, going to bed hungry, or?—
I open the refrigerator.
I stand there, staring, for what feels like a small eternity.
It’s full.
Not has-a-few-things-in-it full. Stocked.
Organized, even, with produce in the crisper, proteins on the second shelf, dairy in the door.
Strawberries, bright red and perfect. A rotisserie chicken.
Greek yogurt and the exact brand of oat milk I put in my coffee every morning — the one that only two stores in this neighborhood carry.
And sitting at the back of the second shelf, placed there as though someone knew it was the thing I wanted most: a container of cremini mushrooms .
I blink at the mushrooms.
Cremini mushrooms were on my grocery list. The list in my phone’s notes app. The one I added to two weeks ago when I found a risotto recipe I wanted to try. The list I have never shown to another person, never mentioned out loud, never shared with anyone on this planet.
Someone read my phone.
Someone was inside my apartment.
I take a step back from the fridge.