4. Ryder
RYDER
By the time Alex lied and told me she was fine, I already knew something was drastically wrong. I just didn’t know what.
Alex walked away from me with her shoulders too tight and her keys clenched hard enough to whiten her knuckles.
She was trying to look calm, which meant she was scared enough to make a production out of hiding it.
I watched her cross the sidewalk toward her car while everything in me strained to follow.
I didn’t move at first. I made myself stay by the coffee shop door with one hand braced against the frame, because the last thing she needed was me chasing her down the block after she’d already pulled away.
Then I saw the SUV. Again.
Dark. Tinted windows. Parked too long at the far end of the street.
Recognition hit before anything else and my body went still.
Alex stopped walking, and even from half a block away, I saw the way her attention locked on it. She’d seen it, too. Whatever was happening wasn’t something I’d built out of smoke and overprotective instinct. She had felt it before I had proof.
The SUV’s brake lights flared.
I was already moving.
“Ryder?” the barista called behind me.
I didn’t answer.
By the time I hit the sidewalk, the vehicle had pulled away from the curb. A sedan passed between us, blocking my view for half a second, and that was all it took. The SUV slid into traffic, dark paint flashing once in the afternoon sun before it turned right at the next light.
I caught three digits and one letter.
Enough for a search.
But not enough to stop him.
My jaw locked so hard it hurt.
Alex looked back toward me, and for one second everything in her face was open. Fear, confusion, the instinct to reach for me before pride snapped the door shut. Then she turned away and kept walking.
I let her go because she needed to believe she still could.
That was the first lie I told myself.
The second came five minutes later when I climbed into my truck and told myself I was going back to the station because I had paperwork.
I drove two blocks before I pulled over and called Remy Townsend.
One of my closer friends, and an officer with Birch Police Department, Remy was a good guy. We’d traded favors after enough emergency scenes that he didn’t ask many questions when I needed something strange and quick.
“I’ve got a partial plate,” I said when he answered.
“No hello? What am I going to tell Parker about Golden Boy Cook? You’ve lost all your manners.”
“Hello, to you too, Mr. Congeniality. I’ve got a partial plate, or do you want to talk about how you should invest in better inflatable costumes for the next variation of the Ridiculympics?”
He sighed. “Why do I feel like this is going to involve me doing something I’ll regret?”
“Dark SUV. Possibly black, maybe charcoal. Three digits, one letter. Maine passenger plate.”
“That’s nice and vague.”
“I know.”
I give him what I’d seen. It was enough for Remy to start muttering under his breath and typing.
While I waited, I watched Alex’s car disappear from the side street and forced myself not to follow her.
That restraint felt less noble than it should have.
It felt like standing still while someone I cared about walked closer to a cliff.
“You got a reason for this?” Remy asked.
“Maybe.”
“That’s not a reason.”
“It’s tied to a woman who may be getting stalked.”
The typing stopped.
Remy’s voice changed. “You calling this in?”
I looked at the intersection where the SUV had vanished. “Not yet.”
“Ryder.”
“I don’t have enough, and she’s not reported anything that I’m aware of. Just terrified, even if she won’t admit it.”
“And you’re calling me because you’re famously relaxed when you don’t have enough?”
I didn’t answer.
He exhaled through his nose. “Give me a few.”
The call ended, and the silence in the truck immediately filled with Alex.
Her face in the coffee shop when that man said her name.
Her wrist under my fingers last night.
The way she’d looked at the window lock like it had betrayed her personally.
The flowers. The unlocked window. The late-night calls she tried too hard not to describe as calls. A familiar vehicle appearing and vanishing before she could turn fear into evidence that might protect her from whatever bullshit was going on.
I should’ve seen it sooner.
That thought crawled under my skin and stayed there.
I had noticed pieces. I was good at pieces of the whole. Smoke pattern near a baseboard. A door swollen wrong after heat exposure. A patient breathing too shallow before they crashed. I built entire emergencies out of small things most people missed. And I was good at it.
With Alex, I’d seen the pieces and told myself I was being careful.
Because she was Josh’s sister.
Because she’d already been hurt.
Because wanting to know whether her porch light was out after a storm wasn’t the same thing as needing to know she was taken care of.
Except I always knew.
I knew which nights she worked late because the newsroom lights stayed on past nine and her car was the last one in the lot.
I knew she forgot to close her kitchen window when the weather turned warm.
I knew she paced when she was on deadline and left the lamp on beside her couch when she was anxious.
None of that had felt strange before.
It had felt necessary.
That was the part I didn’t like looking at too long.
My phone buzzed twenty minutes later, after I’d made it back to the station and sat through ten minutes of Lieutenant Walsh asking about an incident report I couldn’t have repeated if my life depended on it.
Remy: No full hit. But I’ve got three possible vehicles in the county. One registered two towns over. One commercial. One local address.
My chest tightened.
Local.
I stepped out into the apparatus bay with my phone in my hand and called him back.
“Name?” I asked.
“Can’t give you that.”
“Remy.”
“I said I found possibilities. I didn’t say I was handing you private information because you’ve got a bad feeling and hero eyes.”
“It’s more than a bad feeling.”
“Then make it official.”
I looked across the bay at the engine, at the neat coil of hose, at the tools locked in place where they belonged. Everything here had a procedure. Every emergency had a chain of command, even when the scene went sideways.
Alex did not fit into a procedure.
If I called Josh, he’d storm in. If I called the cops, Alex would have to explain things she wasn’t ready to say out loud. If I dragged everyone into it too soon, I’d lose the ability to move quietly, and some part of me hated that most of all.
I didn’t trust anyone else to get to her fast enough.
The realization landed cold and ugly.
Not because it surprised me.
Because it didn’t.
“Send me what you can without getting fired,” I said.
Remy was quiet for a beat. “You’re walking close to a line that you can’t walk back from once you cross it.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
He hung up before I could lie.
The rest of the afternoon moved around me without touching me.
Calls came through. Men talked. Someone burned coffee in the kitchen badly enough that the whole common room smelled like old grounds and punishment.
I drank a cup anyway and stared at my notebook while the words on the page became less like notes and more like a map of every way I had failed to put the pattern together.
Alex posted on the local site at 3:17.
A short update about the redevelopment story. Two sentences about old buildings, ignored repairs, and residents worried they’d be priced out before anyone bothered fixing the wiring.
The notification appeared on my lock screen before I thought to wonder why I had notifications turned on for her articles.
I tapped it.
Read it.
Read it again.
She’d been downtown for that story. Publicly downtown. Anyone watching her feed would know what she was working on, where she might be asking questions, which businesses she’d been near. It wasn’t a live location, but it was close enough for a man who already knew her patterns.
I set the phone face down in an attempt to keep my mind off her and what she could be doing.
Then picked it back up ten seconds later and opened her profile.
I hated how easy it was to tell myself I was only checking for the potential risk.
By late afternoon, my shift was over, though leaving the station didn’t make me feel off duty. I drove toward home and missed the turn on purpose. Ten minutes later, I was passing Alex’s apartment building at a speed slow enough to annoy the truck behind me but not enough to get me honked at.
Routine.
That was what I called it.
The building looked normal at first glance.
Brick exterior. Slightly uneven front steps.
The half-dead planter by the entrance someone kept forgetting to water.
I’d checked the place after storms since Alex moved in because the old windows leaked and the landlord handled maintenance like a personal insult to his sensibility.
Today, the front door was propped open.
Two men were inside the hall.
One wore a maintenance shirt I recognized from the property company. The other didn’t.
I pulled to the curb across the street and cut the engine.
The unfamiliar man stood near the stairwell with a toolbox in one hand, but nothing about him read like a guy working a job. His boots were too clean. His shirt had no logo. He wasn’t listening to the other worker so much as waiting for him to look away.
Then his gaze shifted down the hall.
Toward Alex’s door.
My hand was on my seat belt before I made a decision.
I crossed the street fast.
The familiar maintenance guy glanced up when I stepped inside. “Can I help you?”
“Fire department,” I said, which was technically true and strategically vague. “You guys working on alarms or something?”
“Leak in 2B,” he said. “Landlord sent us.”
The other man was already moving.
He turned toward the stairs without meeting my eyes, toolbox tucked close against his leg.
“Hey,” I called.