Chapter 27
D ad’s cottage woke up slow—coffee first, then gulls arguing across the street, then the neighbor’s radio trying again and failing to settle on a station.
I lay there listening to the palmetto fronds scrap the screen and tried to pretend my body wasn’t a live wire stretched taut from Charleston to here.
The oak outside made a small, old-house shadow on the wall.
I watched it jump as a squirrel leapt branch to branch.
It was a relief to care about gravity instead of a man. Brief, fragile relief.
I slipped out of bed and jogged the three blocks to the beach before Dad’s kettle boiled.
Morning on Anastasia Island had its own church service—pelicans low and deliberate, sandpipers stitching the edge of water to land, runners with salt already drying white on their shirts.
The surf made that hush-hush sound like someone kindly shushing a nervous system.
It was like Charleston, yet different. I loved both places.
Halfway down the strand, I clocked two men walking where the sand was firm.
Not unusual. Except their shoes were wrong—city soles that slid over coquina like they weren’t built for it.
One pretended to be on his phone. The other scanned, not leering, not friendly.
The air prickled up the back of my neck the way it did when a labor room changed—when something invisible shifted its weight.
I told myself I was jumpy. I was a woman alone at dawn. Jumpiness was a survival skill.
When I turned around, so did they.
I veered toward the pier where other bodies clustered—fishermen with five-gallon buckets, a kid trying to make his skimboard behave, an old man in a straw hat untangling line.
I pretended to stretch by a trash can and got my breath back while my heart raced ahead without me.
The men kept going, past me, not even looking.
I laughed at myself, and the laugh sounded like a hiccup.
What, was I going to be paranoid now?
Back at the cottage, Dad had coffee in a thermos and two paper bags on the counter.
“Ham biscuits from the corner place,” he said, as if he were reporting vital news. “They were out of hot sauce packets, so I committed to a bottle.”
“You’re a hero,” I said, and kissed his cheek.
We ate on the steps with our feet on the sand-streaked bricks. Grandpa called to say he’d found grapefruit “the size of righteous hearts” and would be over in an hour to force us into a historical trolley tour. Dad said, “We’ll pretend to resist.” I agreed to be kidnapped.
Normal. Good.
I showered, pulled on cutoff shorts, a white tee, sandals. When I came back through the front room, a small rectangle of white had been pushed under the door. Junk mail, I thought, reaching for it.
It wasn’t.
No return address. No stamp. Just my name in block letters.
My stomach dropped so fast my knees went weak.
I stood there with the envelope against my palm and tried to talk sense into myself. It could be anything—a neighborhood flyer, a Bible verse from a zealot, a note from Grandma about zinnias.
I slid a finger under the flap and pulled out a single sheet.
LEAVE HIM.
The words were typed. No greeting. No signature. No other instructions. Three inches under them, a second line: WE KNOW WHERE YOU SLEEP.
I folded the paper back on itself because my hands didn’t know what else to do. I set it on the table. I set myself in a chair. I breathed through the urge to be sick.
Dad came out of the hall with a stack of clean towels and a whistle on his lips. He stopped whistling when he saw me. He looked from my face to the paper.
“What’s that?” he asked, voice mild by design.
“I don’t know,” I said. It was the truth.
He picked the paper up with two fingers and read it.
His jaw changed shape like a door latch setting.
He didn’t ask me who “him” was. He didn’t ask why someone would write that.
He took two steps to the counter, opened the junk drawer, and came back with an envelope of old photos. He slid the note inside and sealed it.
“For what?” I asked.
“Evidence,” he said. “If we need it.”
I wanted to say that we won’t. The words died on my tongue.
“Do you want me to call the sheriff?” he asked.
“No,” I said too fast. Then, softer, “Not yet.”
He nodded once like that made sense inside his logic. “Then I’ll change the bulbs on the porch, and we’ll be the most well-lit house in North Florida.”
“Dad—”
“I know,” he said. “But I’m doing it, anyway.”
He went outside. I sat with my phone facedown and fought the urge to throw up and the stronger urge to hurl myself at a man three hundred miles away and tell him everything.
I still hadn’t told Atticus I’d left. I had typed and erased and typed again until the drafts folder looked like a confession booth.
I hadn’t sent a word. Some small, stubborn piece of me had wanted proof that I could make a choice that did not immediately end with his hand at the small of my back.
And here was my proof: a note that said my choices traveled.
Grandpa’s knock came heavy and cheerful. He didn’t notice the sharp air inside the cottage. He had grapefruit in a sack and an itinerary that involved the trolley, the Oldest House Museum, and lunch “where the hushpuppies taste like Jesus forgives you.”
We went because staying felt like an invitation to panic.
I let the trolley driver’s puns wash over me while the live oaks knitted shade overhead.
Spanish moss hung like the city’s old-lady jewelry and clinked in the wind.
We hopped off at the Oldest House and wandered through rooms that had held centuries of quiet.
A docent explained coquina like it was poetry—shell fragments pressed into stone that could take a cannonball and shrug.
I wanted that. To absorb an impact and ask, That all you’ve got?
At lunch I texted Mei— Still in Florida at my Dad’s, shop is yours, you’re a saint —and she sent back, Enjoy.
Darla sent a selfie of a crooked eyeliner wing and wrote, Why won’t my face cooperate? I said, Try brown pencil, not black , and she sent back, I love you. Also Stephen looks gray—will you make him call his doctor?
The words pulled at me like fishhooks. Gray. I wrote, Make him go. I’ll text him tonight .
I still didn’t text Atticus.
At the Castillo de San Marcos, we stood under the bastions while a ranger in a straw hat loaded a cannon with ceremony. Tourists covered their ears. Grandpa didn’t. He winked at me. The boom rolled across the Matanzas and puffed a flock of gulls into the air.
When we came out into the light, my phone lit up.
Unknown number: You were followed this morning. Stop running to the water.
I stopped walking. The world tilted. Dad’s hand landed at the curve of my arm.
“Who’s that from?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Wrong number.” It was not a lie so much as a plea.
We walked back along the seawall. The Bridge of Lions blinked green. Boats shouldered under her and were gone. The men from the beach were nowhere. Or everywhere. Every man in sunglasses became a threat.
Dad steered us home the long way, past the lighthouse—white-red-white-red, unbothered—and the ice cream shop with a chalkboard that said, FLAVORS: Toasted Coconut, Bourbon Pecan, Forgiveness.
At the cottage he checked the windows, the back latch, the lock with the sticky tendency. He did it like he was watering plants. Ordinary. Necessary.
We sat with the grapefruit and salt, a little ritual we always did when life got too sharp.
The juice made my mouth pucker. The salt made it sweet again.
Grandpa told a story about falling out of a pecan tree at thirteen and the lightning that hit the ground ten feet from him two summers later, and how “the Lord had a good aim for missing me twice.” He was talking about luck.
He was telling me he knew the shape of fear and that it passed through.
After they left, the cottage went quiet, but not empty. Dad turned on the porch light though the sky still held blue. He rinsed the knife. He said, like he was asking if I wanted tea, “Do I need to be worried about a man?”
“Yes,” I said, because it was time to stop insulting him with half-truths.
He nodded like he’d suspected as much. He didn’t ask for a name. He didn’t ask if this man loved me or if I loved him back. He just said, “Then let’s be smart,” and got a second hammer out of the hall closet like that was how love worked in his language.
I showered again because the day felt sticky on my skin. In the back room I stood with my towel clutched and my phone in my hand and typed:
I needed space. I came to my dad’s in St. Augustine. I’m safe. I didn’t tell you because I needed to do one thing without you. I’m sorry. I’m not running from you. I’m trying to find where I end and you begin.
I didn’t send it. The cursor blinked like a heartbeat and I stared until my eyes watered. Then I backed out of the thread and opened another. Stephen. You okay? Darla says you’re gray. Don’t mess with me, I’ll drive you to the dr myself.
Dots. Then: I’m okay. Promise. Just tired.
You sound wrong , I wrote.
He sent back a thumbs-up I hated on sight. I typed, Call your doctor , and he typed, Yes, ma’am , and I felt like I was holding down a lid on a pot that wanted to boil over.
At dusk, Dad went to drop off a cooler at Grandma’s. I was alone in the cottage with the porch light pooling warm and the radio finally settling on Sam Cooke. I told myself to read. I told myself to breathe.
In and out.
A scrape sounded at the back window.
Not the oak. Not the squirrel. Metal against wood. Then the faintest rattle at the screen, like fingers testing.
Every hair on my arms lifted. I stood without meaning to and was halfway to the kitchen before my brain caught up.
The kitchen had a drawer with a lot of useless things—rubber bands, matchbooks, a screwdriver that refused to grip—and one useful thing: the big chef’s knife Dad sharpened on Saturdays.
I pulled it free and the weight steadied my hands.
The scrape came again. A whisper of fabric. A murmur.
Not one voice. Two.
“Hey!” I yelled before fear could steal my voice. “Get off my porch.”
Silence. Then the ghost of a laugh that wasn’t amused at all.
I backed into the hall with the knife held stupidly at my side and my phone already dialing 9-1-1.
The operator answered in a calm that made me love her.
I gave the address. I said, “Someone’s at the back window.
” She said, “Units on the way. Stay on the line.” I said, “Okay,” and didn’t feel the word land.
Footsteps sounded on the side path—too soft for Dad’s boots, wrong cadence. The knob on the back door twisted once, slow, like a joke.
A shadow crossed the lit square of the window. Another.
Then the front lock turned.
I hadn’t heard anyone on the front porch. The lock turned like a key was in it.
The door opened.