Chapter 5
Cara talks for forty-seven minutes.
I know because I watch the clock on the microwave the entire time. Standing in my kitchen in the dark — I turned the lights off without thinking, like I needed the conversation to be invisible — leaning against the counter with my hand pressed flat against the cold granite.
Then Nina. Portland. Kate. Same building. Running partners. Three months.
Then Lauren, Amy, Danielle. Different cities. Different names. Same face. Same timeline. Same results.
"Seven confirmed," Cara says. Her voice is precise, clipped. "Nine suspected. She moves every six to twelve months. Changes her name. Finds a woman who's isolated, new to the area, hungry for connection. Befriends her fast — too fast. Then she pivots to the husband."
"How?" My voice sounds strange in the dark kitchen. Thin.
"Shared interests. Proximity. She engineers reasons to be alone with him.
Garden advice. Running routes. She offers to help with things — pick up his dry cleaning, drop off food.
She makes herself useful. Essential. And she's patient.
She doesn't rush the husband. She just — occupies more and more space until the boundary erodes. "
I think about Sophie texting Matt recipes. Sophie at the garden on Thursday. Sophie asking me about our fights.
"Has she—" I swallow. "With Matt. Has she already—"
"We don't think so. Not yet." Cara's voice softens slightly.
"You're early, Priya. Earlier than anyone else.
By the time we found the other women, it was already done.
With you — we caught it. Rachel monitors her.
We know she goes by Sophie now. We know she's in Atlanta. We know she's in your life."
"How do you monitor her?"
"Her real name is Vanessa Reid. She's thirty-four.
Originally from Indianapolis. She uses a rotation of aliases — we've tracked nine — but she keeps certain habits.
Same gym chain. Same community garden model.
She always targets community gardens or yoga studios or book clubs — places where women go alone to build social lives.
And she rents under her real name because landlords run credit checks.
That's how Rachel found her in Atlanta."
Vanessa. Her name is Vanessa.
I say it in my head. Vanessa. The woman I call Sophie.
The woman who bought me honey and calls me flavor queen and remembered that I take chamomile tea.
I try to overlay the name on the face — the face I see at yoga, at the market, in my kitchen.
Vanessa sitting on my counter with her legs crossed.
Vanessa eating my ganache. Vanessa texting love you, flavor queen every other day.
The names won't merge. They feel like different people.
And maybe that's the point. Maybe that's how she does it — she IS different people.
Sophie is real in the same way a high-quality nature-identical flavor is real.
The compounds are right. The structure is right.
The experience in your mouth is indistinguishable from the natural version. The only difference is origin.
"I can hear you going quiet," Cara says. "That's normal. Everyone goes quiet when they hear it."
"I don't — I don't understand why." My hand is still on the counter. I can feel my pulse in my fingertips. "Why does she do this?"
"We don't know. We've never gotten close enough to ask.
Every time someone confronts her, she disappears.
New city, new name, gone. Rachel has a theory — attachment disorder, something from childhood.
Danielle thinks it's more calculated than that.
I think—" She pauses. "I think she doesn't know herself.
I think she stopped knowing where the alias ends and she begins a long time ago. "
"What do you want me to do?"
Silence for a moment. Then: "We want to come to Atlanta. Rachel and I, and Danielle — she's the one who found the hard drive with files on previous targets. We've been tracking Vanessa for two years. We've never had advance warning before. We've never been ahead of her."
"You want to confront her?"
"We want to stop her. Permanently. Not just scare her into moving — actually stop her. But we need your help."
"How?"
"We need you to keep acting normal with her. Don't change anything. Don't let her know you know. If she gets even a hint that something is off, she'll run. She always runs. And then she starts over somewhere else with someone else's marriage."
My stomach turns. The ganache I ate earlier sits heavy — too rich, too dense.
"You're asking me to keep being her friend."
"For a few days. Maybe a week. Until we can get to Atlanta and put the plan together."
"What plan?"
"I don't know yet. That's what we need to figure out when we're there. With you. In person."
I close my eyes. Open them. The microwave clock says 9:52. Matt is upstairs. He probably thinks I'm watching something on my phone or reading.
"Okay," I say. "I'll do it."
"Priya—"
"I'll keep acting normal. I'll keep being her friend. But I need you to promise me something."
"Anything."
"Promise me this is real. Promise me you're not — I don't know — crazy people targeting some woman who happens to look like someone in a photo."
Cara is quiet for a second. Then: "I'll send you the hard drive files. Danielle scanned them. Vanessa keeps notes on her targets — names, schedules, vulnerability assessments. If there's a file on you, you'll know."
"Send it."
"I'll send it tonight."
We hang up. I stand in the dark kitchen for another three minutes. My hands are shaking — not the generic shaking of anxiety but a specific fine tremor in my right hand, the one that holds pipettes at work. The precision hand. It doesn't shake.
I go upstairs. Matt is in bed, laptop open, watching a basketball recap.
"Hey." He looks up. "Were you on the phone?"
"My mom." The lie comes out easy. Smooth. The way a well-formulated flavor reads — no rough edges, no hesitation.
"Everything okay?"
"Fine. She's fine. Just — chatty."
He smiles. Goes back to his screen. I get into bed beside him and look at the ceiling and think about Sophie — Vanessa — at my kitchen counter three hours ago. Eating my chocolate. Drinking my wine. Asking about my marriage.
Do you guys fight?
He noticed I was using the wrong soil amendment.
Most people wouldn't bother.
She was complimenting Matt. To me. Framing him as attentive, thoughtful, worth noticing. Reflecting him back to me in a favorable light — the way you'd describe someone you were developing feelings for.
Except she was doing it to my face. In my kitchen. While eating food I made for her.
My phone vibrates. An email from Cara. Subject line: Files.
I open it under the covers. A Google Drive link. I tap it.
A folder. Inside: scanned documents. Handwritten pages in neat cursive. Each page is a profile. Each profile has a name at the top.
Rachel Thornton — Dallas. Married 6 years. Husband: Derek. Teaches 3rd grade. Book club Tuesdays. Lonely — husband travels for work. APPROACH: book club. TIMELINE: 6 weeks to friendship, 12 weeks to husband. VULNERABILITY: isolation during husband's travel weeks.
Sadie Flores — Austin. Married 3 years. Husband: Jake. Yoga instructor. Recent miscarriage. APPROACH: yoga studio. TIMELINE: 4 weeks to friendship, 10 weeks to husband. VULNERABILITY: grief, emotional distance from husband.
I scroll. Page after page. Nina. Lauren. Amy. Danielle.
And then — the last page.
Priya Mitchell — Atlanta. Married 4 years.
Husband: Matt. Food scientist. Relocated from Chicago 6 months ago.
Community garden plot #14. No local friends.
No family in state. APPROACH: community garden.
TIMELINE: [blank]. VULNERABILITY: geographic isolation.
Husband works long hours. Lonely. Eager for connection.
I read it three times.
Lonely. Eager for connection.
That's me. Reduced to a vulnerability assessment. A target profile written in neat cursive by a woman who hugged me at my front door tonight and said love you, flavor queen.
I close the email. Delete the notification. Clear my browser history.
Matt is asleep beside me. His breathing is even, steady. He doesn't know. He doesn't know that a woman is running a playbook on our marriage — a playbook she's run eight times before in eight different cities on eight different families.
I lie in the dark and I think about synthetic flavors.
How the best ones — the ones consumers can't distinguish from natural — are built by reverse-engineering the real thing.
You analyze the target. Break it down to its component parts.
Identify the key compounds that create the perception of authenticity.
Then you rebuild it from scratch using cheaper materials.
That's what Sophie did. She analyzed me. Broke me down. Identified what I was missing — friendship, connection, someone who showed up — and she rebuilt it. Gave me a synthetic version.
And I couldn't tell the difference.
Until now.
I get up. Go downstairs. Stand in front of the spice cabinet in the dark.
I take out every jar — twenty-six of them — and set them on the counter.
Then I put them back. One by one. This time by frequency of use.
The ones I reach for every day — salt, pepper, garlic powder, cumin — at eye level.
The ones I use once a month — cardamom, star anise, juniper — on the top shelf.
It takes me eleven minutes. When I'm done, it makes sense. For the first time in six months, the arrangement makes sense.
I go back to bed. Matt hasn't moved. His breathing is the same — the slow, deep rhythm of a man who hasn't done anything wrong and doesn't know anything is wrong and sleeps the sleep of the unaware.
I lie beside him in the dark and I listen to the house.
The refrigerator hum. The air conditioning cycling on.
A car on the street outside, headlights sweeping across the ceiling and gone.
These sounds used to make me feel lonely — the evidence of a life too quiet, too still, too far from the people I left in Chicago.
Now they sound like something else. Like the hum of a machine I didn't know was running.
Like the baseline note underneath a flavor you thought was simple but isn't.
Everything in this house is the same as it was three hours ago.
The furniture. The photographs on the wall — our wedding, the trip to Costa Rica, Matt's parents' anniversary.
The jar of Sophie's basil on the windowsill, its roots growing in the water, white and thread-thin and reaching for something.
Everything is the same. And nothing is.
I don't sleep.