Chapter 24
24
“You were right about the man you saw in the photos.” She was afraid to even look at Lachlan, because she was terrified to see his face close up, to watch him withdraw from her. “He thinks we have a relationship, but we don’t. And he won’t let it go.”
“A stalker?”
“I call him SS. Scary Stalker, and sometimes Stupid Stalker. Which is very unoriginal, but proves how much he freaks me out.”
Lachlan settled into the arm chair on the other side of the woodstove. Instead of looking at his face, she kept her eyes on his socks, thick and hand-knitted, with red and green stripes—someone’s Christmas present to him, no doubt. The sight was so wholesome that she teared up again.
“Does he have a real name?” Lachlan asked.
“Yes, of course, but I prefer to never say it. I’m trying to erase him from my existence. Thanos-style, except just in my own head.”
“Is that why you don’t want to talk about him?”
She shivered and inched closer to the heat radiating from the stove. “In a way. It’s like those legends where if you say someone’s name three times in a mirror, they appear. Rumpelstiltskin, Bloody Mary. I always have this secret fear that if I say his name—or even talk about him at all—he’ll pop up like a Jack in the Box. He has a way of doing that. He had a way,” she corrected herself. “That’s in the past now. He doesn’t know where I am and I really need to keep it that way. That’s why I came to Firelight Ridge, and why I can’t leave yet. I feel safe here, but not anywhere else.”
“I see.”
But she wasn’t sure if that was true. Could he see? Could anyone who hadn’t experienced it know what it felt like to be so powerless? To be always on guard, always waiting for that next shoe to drop? “You don’t see,” she said bluntly. “How can you?”
Right away, she worried that she’d hurt him. Lashing out at the wrong person—that was something she’d found herself doing as she first grappled with her situation. But a quick glance at him told her he hadn’t taken it personally. He was still watching her with his head cocked, waiting for whatever she said next.
“I mean, it’s hard to convey the feeling of being someone’s…prey. It didn’t matter what I said, what I did, he just kept hounding me. He came to my school and freaked out the history teacher I was just starting to date. He figured out how to get into my apartment and would just…be there when I came home. Just hanging out, making dinner, waiting for me to get back.”
“Jesus. Did you call the police?”
“Of course, but that’s the thing. He’s a police officer. I live in a very small town with a police chief who’s been around forever. Guess who his son is?”
“SS?”
She liked the fact that he used her nickname for him so easily. It felt like he was taking her side. “Exactly. His only son, mind you. Very spoiled, very used to getting his way. Also, since he was a cop, he was very savvy about knowing how to cover his tracks. Every time he managed to get into my apartment, he made it seem as if someone had called him from my landline. There were all kinds of situations like that, where it would have been his word versus mine, and he always had some kind of bogus evidence that would back him up. I reported him several times, even got a restraining order, but it didn’t make a difference. I’d call the police but no one would show up. I think he might have been intercepting the calls somehow. He spread rumors about me and threatened to charge me with stuff I didn’t do.”
Shudders were running through her body as she brought back those memories. Trauma lives in your body, someone had told her. She’d never understood what that meant, until SS. Now she knew on a visceral level.
“I even talked to his father, the police chief. I was still in my naive phase, thinking he might do something to help me. I sat in his office with all his awards on the walls, photos of him shaking hands with politicians and so forth. I explained that SS wouldn’t leave me alone even though I’d said ‘no’ a million times. I told him I’d done some research and thought that his son should see a behavioral therapist. I even gave him a list of names.”
“What did he do?”
“Told me to fuck off. I mean, he said it nicely, with a smile, and not in those words. He said something about ‘young ladies who make up stories to get attention,’ and how much our town owed the police for maintaining law and order, and then he specifically mentioned my father’s business. My dad sells medical equipment and one of his contracts is with the ambulance service that the police department uses. The next day, that contract was canceled.”
“Jesus. Sending a message?”
“Exactly. If I made any more noise about his son, my parents would pay the price. He knew my soft spot, that’s for sure. My mom has health issues, and they don’t make a lot of money. I was so afraid that they’d get caught in the middle of that mess.” She swallowed hard, remembering the moment she’d explained the situation to them, sparing them the worst details. It was her mother’s idea that she take a leave from school and get out of Hopper for a while.
“You’ve always wanted to travel,” she’d said. “Maybe now’s the time. Just don’t tell us where, because you know me, I can’t keep a secret to save my life.”
“How long did all this go on?” Lachlan was asking.
“Oh God. Months. His niece was one of my students, and sometimes he’d pick her up at school. That’s how I met him. I think it was April, maybe. Not long before school ended. He was picking her up after debate team practice, and we chatted. He seemed nice enough, so I agreed to go to dinner with him. That was fine, but nothing special. I thought we were too different to really click. He was very open about wanting to get married and start having kids right away. That put me off, as if he was just looking for someone to fill the slot. So after a few more dates and one night together—one—I told him it wasn’t going to work out. He lost it.”
Lachlan’s face darkened, his green eyes turning hard. “Lost it how?”
“He didn’t hurt me,” Maura assured him quickly. “Not physically. But he wouldn’t let me leave. We were in his car right outside my house, and he locked the doors and kept me there until four in the morning, just yammering at me about how we were destined to be together and I’d come around eventually.”
“What did you do?”
“I had to get out of there, so I told him I would think about it, and we should talk more the next day. I was hoping that he’d come to his senses and realize he was acting like an idiot. And no,” she said before he could ask, “it didn’t work. At first he sent me lots of angry texts, then he started pursuing me even harder. He seemed to see me as a challenge. His personal Mount Everest. He started a full-on flowers-and-courtship campaign. To other people, it seemed romantic. My colleagues at school, some of my friends, everyone thought he was just…exuberantly in love.
“But it never felt that way to me. He was a…wolf in sheep’s clothing. It was coercive, and no matter how many times I asked him to stop, he didn’t. He thought he’d wear me down, and I thought he’d get bored and move on. There were plenty of other women in town, women who would have wanted the attention. I didn’t understand why he didn’t go after one of them.”
“What would have been the fun in that?” Lachlan said dryly. Then he caught himself. “Oh shit. That didn’t come out right. I meant?—”
“I know what you meant. And I agree. The fact that I didn’t want him, that was what made me so attractive. He wanted to win, to defeat me, to obliterate my rejection. It drove him crazy that anyone tried to resist him. I think he genuinely had never dealt with rejection before.” She let out a long sigh and slumped against the hard base of the couch. This wasn’t a story to be told from a comfortable position. It helped to have a firm surface at her back.
“Important life skill, dealing with rejection,” Lachlan murmured.
Which made her think of the graceful way he’d taken her rejection of his dinner invitation. Lachlan was a mature adult who could handle a “no.” It was as if he existed in a different universe than SS.
“Yes. I guess I should be grateful now to the boy who gave me back my valentine in third grade. He said it looked dumb. I cried for two days over it. I thought my life was over at the age of nine.”
Lachlan chuckled, then ran a hand through his hair. “If we’re going to get into rejection stories…wait’ll you hear the one in which the skinny science nerd took the cheerleader to see the Perseid meteor shower, only to find out she was trying to get his twin brother’s attention, and also that she had an aversion to extra layers of clothing and blamed him when she came down with bronchitis. I would call it social ruin, except there wasn’t much to ruin. After that, I waited until college to try again.”
“Awwwww.” For some reason, she found that story absurdly endearing. “Did her ploy work?”
“Hell no. If she really wanted Gil, she should never have gone out with me. That was the one way to guarantee he wouldn’t be interested. Gil has always been an exceptionally loyal brother.”
She climbed onto her feet and plopped herself onto the couch next to him. “I can see why,” she said softly. “I think you’d be easy to be loyal to.”
He touched her lightly on the shoulder, then drew his hand away. She grabbed it and put it there herself. “Don’t do that,” she said.
“Clarify, please.”
“Don’t withdraw in advance. I’ll tell you if I don’t want something. Does that make sense?”
He thought about it for a moment, then nodded. “When I asked you to dinner that first time?—”
“Nothing wrong with that. I’m glad you did. Even though I said ‘no,’ now look at us.” She leaned to one side and brushed her lips against his cheek. “Cuddling together on a couch hoping that horror-movie wolf doesn’t come back.”
He snorted with laughter, and the world seemed to fill up with light.