Chapter Twelve – Abbey
I fidgeted as I checked my phone for the millionth time. I still couldn’t believe she had actually agreed to meet with me, but I had no idea if Iris was planning to turn up or if she was about to let this slip through her fingers.
When I had reached out to her the day before last, she had sounded pretty nervous about coming to see me in Atwood. When I had explained to her that there was something going on with Franco and I wanted to talk to her about it, I could tell that she wanted to just hang up and be done with it. But she took a deep breath and told me that she was willing to see me to talk about what she had been through.
And now, I was waiting at a coffee shop not far from my apartment, wondering when she was going to make her arrival. I didn’t want to call and hassle her as to when she was going to get here, but there was part of me that was getting impatient. No, not impatient, it wasn’t that – I was getting nervous. Nervous that she wasn’t going to show up at all.
Or that Franco might have gotten out in front of her and stopped her from coming to this meeting. That was the part that freaked me out the most, the part I knew I couldn’t handle. If something had happened to her because of me, because of what I had done, I knew I wouldn’t have been able to forgive myself. I had to believe that this was the right call, even though, the more time that passed, the more doubtful I became that it was...
Chuck had no idea what I was doing today, and that’s how I wanted to keep it. Not that he wouldn’t have helped me, of course, no - I knew he would have done everything he could to make this easy on me. But I didn’t want him to know how freaked I was about everything that was happening with Franco. I didn’t want to ruin the fun we were having, the good times that we were sharing, by pulling him back down to Earth with the reminder of my ex. I could tell that there was something going on inside his head when Franco got brought up, and I was curious to know just how far down that went. At the same time, though, things were going so well between us. Why would I let my shithead ex get in the way of that when I could just relax and have fun instead?
Finally, the door to the coffee shop opened, and I practically sprang to my feet when I saw Iris heading through the door. She’d texted me a picture of herself, making sure I wouldn’t be fooled into meeting up with someone else. I grinned, waving her over, and she tucked a strand of dark, curly hair behind her ear and came over to join me.
”Hey,” she greeted me, offering me a slight smile.I wondered how much convincing she’d had to do to herself to get her out here at all. She seemed terrified, eyes darting this way and that, like she was expecting Franco to leap out from behind a corner at any given moment.
”Thanks so much for meeting with me, Iris,” I told her. ”I know it can’t have been easy for you. My friend Rina told me about you, said you’d been through some of the same stuff I had...”
She let out a long sigh, picking at a spot on the table where the whorls of the wood met beneath her finger.
”I’m so sorry you had to go through it, too,” she muttered. ”I told myself that he would never do that to someone else, he was just stupid when it came to me, but...but if I’d known he was going to pull something like this on you, too, I would have done more to stop him.”
”It’s not your fault,” I told her firmly. ”It’s his. You have nothing to be sorry about. He’s the one who should be apologizing.”
”Yeah, but...” she trailed off, then shook her head. I could tell how hard it was for her to even talk about this, the weight of it still hanging heavy on her mind.
”Anyway,” she continued, shaking her head, like she was brushing off the thought. ”What exactly did you want to talk about?”
I leaned forward, wrapping my fingers around the tea before me.
”I wanted to talk to you about what you know about him,” I explained. ”I...I left Lilyvale just like you did, after he got too intense for me. But I have this feeling...like he’s following me. Like he somehow knows where I am.”
”Like he’s leaving messages that only you’re meant to see?” she asked, and my eyes widened.
”It happened to you, too?” I asked softly. Fuck. I hadn’t considered that this was his gameplan. That he was used to doing it like this, used to making us feel as though we were completely and utterly crazy.
”Yeah, he kept dropping off packages with my neighbors that they had to deliver to me,” she explained, shaking her head. ”Flowers, gifts, stuff like that. And they would all think it was the sweetest thing, that I had this admirer who wanted to lavish me with so much attention, but...I knew it was nothing like that. I knew who it was. And I knew he was trying to get under my skin.”
I swallowed hard.
”Graffiti for me,” I explained. ”There have been these pictures turning up on my apartment building. Stuff that relates to me, that only someone who actually knew me would know about.”
”That’s so twisted,” she whispered, shaking her head. ”It sounds exactly like something he would do.”
”But why?” I asked, frowning, hands twisting in front of me. ”Why would he do all of this? You broke up with him too, right? You made it clear you didn’t want to be with him?”
She gave me a slightly sad smile.
”Because it’s not about wanting to be with us,” she explained. ”It’s about having power over us. Control. That’s what he wants. If he wanted to actually be in our lives, he would never have done something like this. He wouldn’t have stalked or followed us or tormented us the way he has, the way he does.”
I fell silent. I had never considered it like that. Then again, I had never really allowed myself to. I had to believe that he was just making some kind of mistake, and he had no idea how he really came across – but if what she was saying was true, then that was all bullshit. He knew precisely what he was doing, and he clearly enjoyed it.
”You think that’s what it is?” I asked her. ”I thought...I don’t know, I thought he was just taking the break-up badly...”
”Yeah, that’s what I thought at first too,” she replied. ”But I saw my other friends have break-ups, bad ones, even – and they were messy, sure, but they didn’t look like anything he had put me through. He was so possessive and insecure when I was with him, I figured he was just...”
”He was just doing anything he could to get you back,” I finished for her softly. I had been here too, been through every step of this just the way she had. It was comforting, in some ways, to know that I wasn’t alone in navigating this nightmare. But at the same time, it horrified me, deep down to my bones, to realize that I had just become another one of the prey animals snared in his trap.
”It’s not about love,” she told me, shaking her head. ”It never was. It was about control. And this is his way of controlling you. Making you feel like you’re going crazy, like you’re paranoid. Everyone around you feels like you’re just over-reacting, because you hid so much from them when you guys were together, you didn’t want to expose him like that. But then you realize it’s worse than you ever could have imagined. And you don’t know how to stop it.”
It was almost eerie, hearing someone else put it into words like that. Hearing her lay it out so plainly for me like that. I stared down into my coffee, heart pounding, head reeling with a helpless panic.
”How did you stop it?” I asked her. ”I mean, you left Lilyvale, but beyond that...”
”I don’t think I did,” she admitted, as she looked up at me. ”I think you did, Abbey.”
Horror slithered through my system. I had? I had been the one to end it? The reality of it hit me like a ton of bricks. Fuck. It wasn’t that he had made the choice to move on from her and give her the peace she needed – it was that he had found someone new to aim his sights at.
”That’s what I have to wait for?” I asked her. ”I have to wait for him to find some other woman he can obsess over and stalk like this?”
She gazed at me sadly.
”I wish it didn’t have to be this way,” she replied. ”But I don’t see any other way to get him to stop. In all the time I knew him, it wasn’t until you came into the picture that he actually let up on me. He needs someone to focus his energy on. I don’t know what happens if he doesn’t have that...”
She trailed off, leaving the possibility of it hanging in the air, dangerous and threatening.
Shit. Shit, shit, shit. I had no idea what to do. No idea if this was a good thing or not. Eventually, he would find someone else, wouldn’t he? But was that fair for the next woman he targeted? Was it fair for me to just wait for him to land someone new in his sights?
Iris suddenly reached across the table and gave my hand a squeeze.
”I know how hard this is,” she told me. ”But it’s not going to last forever, alright? You’re not always going to be in the middle of this.”
”I know,” I murmured. ”But when I’m not...someone else is going to be.”
And that was the part I was struggling with most of all.