Chapter 6 - Benedict #2
The lavender dress from the wedding is at the far end, in a dry-cleaning bag.
I unzip the bag and touch the fabric. Thin, soft, slightly cool.
This is what she was wearing when I first saw her.
When the world rearranged itself around a woman across a reception hall, and I understood, between one heartbeat and the next, that I was finished.
I zip the bag closed.
I sit on her bed. This is the furthest point—the innermost circle of her private life.
The place where she sleeps, where she's most vulnerable, where the defenses she maintains all day finally come down.
I sit on the edge and put my hands on the sheets and feel the cool cotton and the give of the mattress beneath me.
This is where she lies in the dark and checks her locks and listens for sounds she can't identify. This is where the fear lives—not in her office, not on the street, but here, in the thin hours between waking and sleep, when the rational mind loses its grip and the body remembers what it knows.
I've been in this room. In this bed. She just doesn't know it yet.
I check my watch. Fifteen minutes. Long enough.
I leave the way I came. Deadbolt, pins, stairs, vestibule. The blue door closes and November hits my face and I'm back on the street, unremarkable. She'll never know I was there. Nothing moved, nothing missing, no trace. The apartment will be exactly as she left it when she comes home tonight.
And I'll be outside. In the car. Watching the window. Knowing what the room looks like from the inside. Carrying the scent of her apartment on my clothes.
***
That night, I sit in the nave and do the other thing.
The crisis center. Lucy volunteers there every Tuesday. It's hers—the work she does for free, the one space in her life that has nothing to do with the Ambroses, nothing to do with me, nothing to do with anything except her need to sit with people in pain and hold them together.
I'm going to put myself inside it.
A donation. Fifty thousand dollars—nothing to me, everything to a walk-in crisis center operating on grants and goodwill. The kind of money that makes a small nonprofit send thank-you letters, schedule meetings, reorganize its calendar around the generous new benefactor.
I spend an hour building it. A shell foundation with a clean name and a plausible mission. Mental health services. Community support. The language of philanthropy, which is just another language for control.
The money goes through Thursday. By Friday, the center's director will know the donor's name. Benedict Ambrose. Philanthropist. Interested in mental health. Would love to meet the team. Would love to learn about the volunteer program.
Lucy will hear my name from someone she trusts—a colleague, the director, a fellow volunteer.
She'll hear it in the context of generosity and support, and she'll know—instantly, with that clinical precision I'm learning to both admire and fear—exactly what I've done.
That the dark street was the first approach, and when the distance closed and opened again, I found another way in.
That I've inserted myself into the one space she thought was safe.
She won't be able to warn anyone. What would she say?
A man is donating fifty thousand dollars to our crisis center, and I think he's doing it to get close to me.
She'd sound paranoid. Ungrateful. Unhinged.
The donation is real. The money is real.
The fact that it's also a hunting strategy is something only she and I will know.
And she can't refuse to be in the room when a major donor visits.
Can't excuse herself from the thank-you dinner, the volunteer meeting where the director introduces the generous benefactor who's ensuring the center can keep its doors open.
She'll have to stand there, shake my hand, smile, play the grateful volunteer. All while knowing exactly what I am.
I'm not entering her life. I'm surrounding it.
I send the email. Close the laptop. The church is very quiet. Christ watches from the apse with his chipped, unreadable expression.
Two moves in one day. The apartment—physical, primal, the animal need to be inside her space.
To touch her towel and sit on her bed and hold her necklace and breathe the air that she breathes.
The donation—strategic, patient, the long game of a man who understands that the most effective cage is one the prey walks into willingly.
One is the vocabulary of the body. The other is the vocabulary of power. Both are saying the same word.
Mine.
I climb the stairs to the choir loft. Lie in the dark. The sheets smell like stone and cold water. If I close my eyes, I can still smell her apartment—that trace of something warm and clean and human that clung to my coat on the drive home.
Left side of the bed. Sertraline, 50mg. A lavender dress in a dry-cleaning bag. A spare key in the kitchen drawer that I didn't take, but could have. A blue toothbrush. A damp towel on a hook. The slight give of her mattress under my weight.
I hold these things in the dark the way a man holds stolen jewels. Turning them. Watching them catch light that isn't there. Each one a piece of her I've taken without asking. Each one making me want to take more.
Tomorrow, I'll be on her block at six. The day after that, and the day after that.
And on Tuesday, when the crisis center director calls a meeting to announce the donation that will keep their doors open for another year, Lucy Anderson will hear my name and understand that there is no part of her life I can't reach.
No lock I can't open. No space I can't fill with the fact of my attention.
The thought fills the church like smoke. I breathe it in.
I don't tell Christ not to judge me. There's nothing left to say. The man who would have hesitated died a long time ago, if he ever existed, and what's left is just this—hunger, patience, and the methodical dismantling of every wall between me and the woman I'm going to have.
Whatever it takes. However long it takes.
However, much of myself I have to burn to get there.