7. Alex
ALEX
The motion light outside my apartment is trying to kill me.
Not directly, obviously. That would be rude and weirdly ambitious for a piece of hardware.
But every time the hallway flashes white in the miniscule gap on the floor, my body reacts like someone just kicked the door in.
My shoulders jump. My stomach drops. My fingers lock around whatever I’m holding until my knuckles ache.
It doesn’t matter that half the time it’s Mrs. Vance taking her trash out.
My brain has decided the light is a warning, and my brain, unfortunately, lives inside my skull with no plans to relocate.
I last forty-eight minutes after Ryder leaves.
Forty-eight heroic, stupid minutes.
Then the hallway glows again, and I’m done. I grab my laptop, my bag, my keys, and the last shreds of my dignity before I can talk myself out of it and storm outside.
Lucy’s Bar is downtown and the perfect place for me to hide behind a laptop screen and maybe some tacos.
It’s warm and full of people who don’t know my apartment has turned into the least relaxing haunted house in Maine.
Lucy's smells like fried onions, beer, old wood, and the lemon cleaner someone uses on tables between customers.
Basketball plays on two TVs above the bar.
A group of men in work boots laughs near the dartboard.
Somebody at the counter is arguing with the bartender about whether chili belongs on fries, which feels like the sort of low-stakes debate I need to be around.
Public place.
Visible exits.
Decent lighting.
Bathroom near the back, kitchen door to the left, front door behind the hostess stand. Three servers moving through the room. One bartender built like he could break up a fight if he had to.
Best of all? Parker gave me the password for the wifi last year so I can work for as long as I need to.
I am not spiraling. Not in the slightest. I am making reasonable safety observations while ordering fries and a few tacos.
That’s totally different than spiraling and needing to be in a safe space so I don’t get kidnapped or murdered because my new motion-sensored light is a bit aggressive on the lighting front.
I pick a booth along the wall because it lets me see the front entrance without sitting with my back exposed. My laptop goes on the table, and I’ve got the charger in case I need it. My recorder sits beside it, half-hidden under my notebook.
I spend roughly the next eleven minutes trying to get my blood pressure to go down while I doom scroll on social media.
During those eleven minutes, my server comes by and I order a blackberry ginger beer with extra lime, because I have work to do and possess the survival instincts of a woman in the twenty-first century.
By nine-fifteen, I’ve almost gone through all of my recordings from interviews on the redevelopment project, the fries are cold, and I have enough notes to turn Mason Ridge into a story that will make at least three landlords and one city inspector regret opening their email.
The tacos were gone thirty seconds after they were placed on the table.
For a few minutes, I feel like I’m actually accomplishing something.
The bar hums around me, loud enough to make the worries in my apartment feel far away.
My fingers move across the keyboard. I build a lead headline twice, delete it twice, then type something less dramatic than electrical negligence with a body count waiting to happen.
My drink sweats beside the laptop. Lime slices press against the glass, bright green and harmless.
A shadow falls across the table.
“I almost didn’t recognize you without cranberry vodka.”
That fucking voice.
Everything is wrong.
I should have paid better attention.
I don’t look up right away. My body is screaming at me to run, and every other part of me tries to leave at once.
My heart lunges. My lungs forget to inhale and I almost choke on air.
My legs go hollow beneath the booth, useless things tucked under a table while the past slides into the seat across from me.
I’m right back where he wants me, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
Preston smiles like he has every right to be there.
He looks exactly the same in all the ways that matter to normal people.
Clean-shaven. Dark blond hair styled like he didn’t have to work for it.
Charcoal coat, blue shirt, expensive watch.
The kind of face people trust before he opens his mouth because the world is stupid and men like him know how to dress and hide their monstrous insides.
“Alexandra,” he says.
He doesn’t deserve to call me by my name.
Not like that.
My throat tightens and I practically gasp out a response. “Don’t call me that.”
His smile warms by a degree, and I hate that I know the difference. I hate that some trained, broken part of me still catalogs his moods like weather.
“I missed that.” He glances at my drink, then signals to the server before I can speak. “She’ll have another blackberry ginger beer. Extra lime.”
The booth tilts.
It doesn’t actually. I know that. The sticky tabletop stays flat beneath my palms. The TV keeps playing basketball. The bartender laughs at something near the taps.
But my body isn’t in Lucy’s anymore.
My body is in every room where Preston knew things he shouldn’t know because he was stalking me even though we were in a relationship and he didn’t respect or acknowledge any type of boundary.
He knew my schedule before and better than I ever did.
My passwords, which I swear to god I changed at least three times but they were always changed back.
The friend I met for coffee once when he was supposed to be at work and I thought maybe she could give me advice.
Even the shirt I wore because he said it made me look cheap, and I wore it anyway because I was still stupid enough to think defiance and freedom were the same thing.
The server nods and walks away, completely unaware that she has just accepted a drink order from the human equivalent of black mold in a handsome coat and overpriced cologne.
“I don’t want that,” I say. “I don’t want anything that has to do with you.”
Preston leans back with a small, wounded laugh. “Still stubborn.”
“I’m leaving.”
His gaze moves to my laptop. “In the middle of work? That doesn’t sound like you. You always were so dedicated when you weren’t being difficult.”
My fingers curl around the edge of the table. “Leave.”
“Give me five minutes.”
“No.”
He sighs, and the sound scrapes down my spine. “You used to be kinder than this.”
There it is.
The first hook that he’s trying to drive into my soul.
A memory pressed into the shape of guilt.
I push my laptop closed slowly, because fast movements feel like danger even in public. “I used to be a lot of things until you destroyed me.”
“You were happy.”
I laugh once before I can stop myself. It comes out sharp enough that a woman at the next table glances over. Good. Look. Please look. Please see me.
Preston’s eyes flick toward her and back to me. The smile stays, but his jaw shifts.
“Careful,” he says quietly. “You don’t want to make a scene.”
My skin goes cold.
Not because I believe him.
Because I do, and I know what he thinks he can do to me.
Making a scene was never safe, and there was never a real gauge on what making a scene actually looked like.
Anything that he didn’t like, essentially.
Crying was disrespectful because it meant that I wasn’t taking his feelings about whatever was happening into consideration.
Asking for space meant I was hiding something.
Every normal human reaction turned into proof that I deserved whatever came next.
And what came next was always violent and humiliating.
But I know something Preston doesn’t. I know that Ryder’s truck has been going by my apartment for a few weeks late at night. Even if I don’t want to talk to him, or anyone, about it. Ryder might know where I am.
I just need to hold on until he gets here.
Or figure out how to get his attention without Preston hurting me first.
I slide my laptop into my bag with hands that don’t feel steady enough to belong to me. “I said move.”
Instead, he rests one arm along the back of the booth like he’s settling in. “I saw the firefighter, Alexandra. You used to have better taste.”
The room narrows as my heart rate accelerates to an almost painful staccato.
Preston watches my face, pleased when he finds whatever reaction he wanted. “Ryder, right? Josh’s friend. He always looked at you like he wanted you.”
“Stop.”
“He was obvious, even back then.” Preston tilts his head, studying me as if I’m still something he can take apart.
“You pretended not to notice, but you liked it, like the whore you used to be. The attention. The big protective routine that he used to put on in order to make you trust him. I used to wonder if you picked fights with me hoping he’d rescue you.
You just wanted him to make you his whore the whole time, didn’t you? ”
My stomach turns.
“That’s not true.”
I don’t know why the words leave my lips. Can’t understand why I feel the need to defend myself to the man who hit me.
I need to escape. But he spent years…years manipulating me and beating me into submission, and that doesn’t just go away because I escaped him.
“No?” His voice stays pleasant, which makes all of this so much worse. “Then why is he spending time with you now? Fixing your windows. Walking you to doors. Standing in parking lots with his hands all over you.” He practically spits at me. “He’s touching you, and you don’t belong to him.”
My mouth goes dry.
He saw us in Mason Ridge. Which means that Ryder isn’t the only one following me.
Preston’s smile fades into something flatter and uglier. “You think I don’t know what you’re doing? Running to another man so you can pretend you’re not mine?”
“I’m not yours.”
His eyes harden.