14. Alex
ALEX
The newsroom is loud enough to feel normal.
Marcy spots me from her office doorway.
Her face changes.
Not a lot. Just enough.
I hate that I know the look now.
“I’m working,” I tell her before she can ask.
Marcy lowers the red pen in her hand. “Good morning to you too.”
“Morning implies optimism. I’m not committing.”
Sam swivels his chair halfway around, phone tucked against his shoulder. “That smells like muffin.”
“It’s medicinal,” I tell him, setting the paper bag on my desk.
“Is there a second medicinal muffin?”
“No, but I have a banana you can have if you promise not to describe last night’s hockey game to me.”
He looks tempted, which says troubling things about both the banana and hockey.
I hang my purse on the back of my chair and set my laptop bag beside the desk. The normal motions help. Chair. Bag. Coffee. Computer. The little rituals of being a person with a job instead of a woman with an ex who keeps finding new ways to remind her she is watched.
I reach for my keyboard.
Then stop.
The pen cup is turned wrong.
It’s stupid. Tiny. The chipped side usually faces the wall because I don’t like looking at the crack, but now it faces me, a jagged white line through blue ceramic.
My eyes move to the drawer beneath the desk.
Not closed all the way.
A thin strip of darkness shows at the top.
My hand lowers slowly to my side.
“Marcy,” I say.
She is already moving by the time I look up. “What?”
I point at the desk. “That’s wrong.”
The room does not go silent. That only happens in movies. Here, Sam keeps murmuring into the phone for two more seconds before he realizes Marcy has stopped beside me. Linda’s spoon taps the edge of her oatmeal cup. The copier coughs out one sad page after another.
“What’s wrong?” Marcy asks, softer now.
“My pen cup.” My voice sounds calm enough to belong to someone else. “And the drawer.”
Marcy looks, then holds up one hand without touching the desk. “Nobody come over here.”
Sam hangs up so fast his headset knocks against his chin. “What happened?”
“I don’t know yet,” Marcy says. “Stay there.”
I take one step back.
In my head, I want to think that we’re being dramatic.
But working in news, one of the things that I’ve learned is that our building is secure for a reason.
All it takes is one pissed off business owner, or someone who didn’t want their arrest to be covered, and they try to take it out on the reporter doing their job.
My things being out of place at home, I can brush off like no one’s business. But here? In this building? In this room? My space is sacred, and it being touched could mean someone other than Preston is trying to hurt me.
While I’m panicking, Marcy inspects my desk.
Something white sticks out from beneath my keyboard when she shifts it with a pen.
A folded page.
My byline shows along the edge.
My stomach drops so fast I have to grab the back of my chair.
“Alex?” Marcy asks.
I pull my phone from my pocket with fingers that don’t feel like mine. The screen blurs for half a second before Ryder’s name appears.
He answers before the first ring finishes.
“Alex?”
I close my eyes. Just for one breath.
“Someone was at my desk,” I tell him. “He…There’s something under my keyboard.” I correct myself, knowing that there are nosey as fuck reporters all paying attention to my every move.
A door slams on his end. “Did you touch it?”
“No.”
“Are you alone?”
“No. Marcy’s here. The office is full.”
“Back away from the desk.”
“I did.”
“Good. Don’t let anyone touch it.” His voice goes flat, controlled, and worse than yelling. “I’m coming.”
“You have shift.”
“I’m coming.”
The call ends.
I lower the phone and find Marcy watching me.
“Ryder’s coming,” I say, which is unnecessary since my face probably announced it with a full marching band.
Marcy nods once, telling me that she’s kept quiet for a whole lot of reasons that I’m not going to look too closely at right now. “Sam, unlock the front door and make sure that he knows.”
Sam’s eyes widen. “Is Ryder going to break the door?”
“Not if it’s unlocked.”
“I hate that that’s a reasonable answer,” I mutter.
Marcy glances at me. “Sit in my office.”
“No.”
“Alex.”
“If I sit down, I’m going to start thinking.” I keep one hand on the back of my chair and stare at the folded page. “And shaking. And I might throw up. I can’t do that yet.”
So I stand there.
For six minutes.
Ryder reaches the newsroom in six minutes wearing his department uniform and the kind of face that makes Sam step backward into the filing cabinet. He comes through the open door fast, but not loud. His eyes find me before they find the desk.
“Are you hurt?” he asks.
I shake my head.
He stops in front of me, close enough that I can smell soap and the cold air from outside on his clothes. His hand lifts, but he catches it before he touches me in front of the entire office.
I almost reach for him.
That scares me badly enough that I fold both arms over my stomach.
Ryder sees that too.
“What’s been touched?” he asks Marcy, though his eyes stay on my face.
“Nothing,” she says. “She noticed before she sat down.”
His gaze moves to the desk, and his jaw locks. “Remy needs to see it.”
“I already called him,” Marcy says. “When she was calling at you.”
Ryder looks at her then.
She lifts her eyebrows. “I am occasionally useful in a crisis.”
“More than occasionally,” I say, because I need my voice to work.
Marcy’s eyes soften, but she doesn’t come closer.
Ryder does. One step. Then he stops again, torn between reaching for me and giving me the space I literally told him that I needed. “You’re shaking.”
“I’m furious.” I try to cover my real feelings.
“That too.”
“Don’t be accurate right now.” My voice cracks, and I hate it. “It’s obnoxious.”
“I know.”
Remy arrives two minutes later with rain on his shoulders and gloves already on his hands. Parker definitely told him everything from Lucy’s, because when he looks at me, his face has none of his usual teasing.
“Alex,” he says gently. “I’m going to take pictures first. Then I’ll move the keyboard. You don’t have to watch if it’s something you may be triggered by.”
I laugh once, thin and ugly. “I’m pretty sure I do.”
Ryder’s hand flexes at his side, but he doesn’t argue.
Remy photographs the desk from every angle. The pen cup. The drawer. The keyboard. The little strip of paper beneath it. Then he lifts the keyboard carefully, and the folded article opens enough for the headline to show.
I know that headline.
I wrote it two years ago.
A feature about domestic-violence survivors and the first year after leaving. The relief. The pain. The restructuring and survival of new habits.
Black marker cuts across the middle in thick, ugly letters.
YOU WERE NEVER ONE OF THEM.
The office disappears as my vision blurs at the edges.
For a second, I’m back at the tiny kitchen table in Preston’s apartment, writing about women who had packed bags in secret and whispered to advocates from grocery-store bathrooms. I remember the cursor blinking after the final sentence.
I remember Preston texting that dinner better be ready when he got home.
I remember saving the document and wondering what kind of hypocrite writes about escape while checking the time for the man she’s afraid to disappoint.
My knees unlock.
Ryder catches my sleeve, not my wrist. Even now, he’s being careful so that he doesn’t cause more harm. God. How is he so perfect?
“Here,” he says, low and close. “Stay here.”
I stare at the article.
“He picked that one on purpose,” I whisper.
“I know.”
“I wrote it while I was still with him.”
Ryder goes very still beside me.
The newsroom is watching. I can feel them trying not to. I can feel every breath and every careful shift, and suddenly my skin feels too tight for an audience.
“I don’t want to do this here,” I tell him.
“Then we won’t.” Ryder looks at Remy. “Do you need her right now?”
Remy slips the article into an evidence bag. “Not here. But we need the report, Alex. The Lucy’s incident, the photo on your door, this. All of it needs to be official because he is going to escalate.”
My throat closes.
There it is.
The thing I avoided by going to work. Like journalism and a muffin could save me from having to sit in a room and say Preston’s name and the things he did to me. I’ll have to wait while it’s written down. I’ll have to sign a statement.
Ryder’s fingers are still curled around my sleeve. He loosens them. The small correction almost breaks me.
I’m tired of the corrections. I’m tired of the space I asked for. But I’m so far into it, I don’t know how to ask him to stop. To hold me.
“I know,” I say.
Marcy opens her office door wider. “Use my office.”
I nod because words feel expensive.
Ryder walks beside me, not ahead of me, through the ten feet in the newsroom and into Marcy’s office. He doesn’t touch me again until the door is mostly closed and the glass wall still leaves enough visibility that I don’t feel trapped.
Then he holds out his hand.
I look at it for a second before taking it.
His palm is warm, callused, steady. Mine is cold and damp, which feels rude after the man already brought me coffee, shelter, and an emotional crisis before lunch.
“You can file the report today,” he says, crouching in front of the chair after I sit. “Or I can take you back to my house, and we can call Remy from there. He can come to you. Or we can call Josh. Your parents. Whoever you want if you don’t want it to be me.”
I stare at our joined hands. “I should tell Josh.” Don’t let go.
“You can.” He nods.
“I should have told him already.”
“Maybe.”
My eyes lift.
Ryder’s mouth tightens. “I’m not going to lie and say he shouldn’t know. But I’m also not going to sit here and make you feel worse for needing time.”
That makes my eyes burn, so I look at Marcy’s desk instead. There is a mug full of red pens, a stack of proofs, and a sticky note that says CALL CITY HALL AGAIN with three angry underlines.
“I don’t know if I can file it,” I admit.
Ryder’s thumb moves once over my knuckle. “Okay.”
“No, not okay.” My voice shakes, and I hate that it happens on those words.
“I know I have to. I know Remy needs it. I know it’s not just me anymore, and I know Preston keeps getting closer because nobody official has enough to stop him.
I know all of that but he still owns that part of me that says to be afraid.
The part telling me to hide and run and make sure no one knows what he did. ”
Ryder waits.
That is somehow worse than him pushing.
“I may need you to help me do it,” I say, the words coming out smaller than I want. “Not speak for me. Not decide. Just sit there so I can find the strength to say everything without crawling out of my own skin.”
His hand tightens around mine for half a second before he eases his grip. “I’ll be there.”
“You have work.”
“I’ll figure it out.”
“Ryder.”
“I’ll figure it out,” he says again, rougher this time. “You need me, I’m there.”
The words hit exactly where I do not want them.
I pull my hand back.
Ryder lets me.
“I can’t keep doing this,” I whisper.
His face changes. “The threats?”
“No.” I fold my hands together in my lap because if I keep touching him, I won’t be able to say it. “You.”
He doesn’t move.
Outside the office, Remy talks quietly with Marcy. Sam walks by the glass wall and immediately turns around when he sees our faces. The copier starts again, because the world has terrible timing.
“I called you first,” I say. “Not Josh. Not my parents. Not Remy. You.”
Ryder’s throat works once.
“And I don’t regret it,” I add, because the pain in his face is too much. “That’s the scary part. I don’t regret it at all. You walked in and I could breathe again, and I don’t know what to do with that.”
“Alex.”
“I don’t know how to need someone this much without being swallowed by it.” My fingers dig into each other in my lap. “I don’t know how to want you and trust you and be angry at you and be scared of how much better I feel when you’re close.”
His radio chirps.
We both freeze.
A dispatcher’s voice breaks through from his shoulder, calling all of the fire department’s units to a multi-vehicle accident on Route 9. Ryder closes his eyes for one brief second, and when he opens them, the fight in his face is awful.
He has to go.
I can see it before he says anything.
“Go,” I tell him.
“No.”
“Ryder.”
“I can call—”
“No.” I stand before he can start making the world bend around me again. My knees feel questionable, but they hold. “You said I need to decide. I’m deciding. Go do your job.”
His hand curls into a fist at his side. “I don’t want to leave you.”
“I know.”
“I mean it, Alex.”
“I know that too.” I reach up and touch the front of his shirt, just once, right over the hard beat of his heart. “That’s part of the problem.”
His jaw tightens beneath the weight of everything he doesn’t say.
The radio chirps again.
Ryder catches my hand before I can lower it and presses his mouth to my knuckles. Fast. Hard. Not romantic enough to be sweet. Too desperate for that.
Then he lets go.
“Call me,” he says.
“I will.”
“Promise me.”
I almost argue because it is what I do. Instead, I nod. “I promise.”
He looks like leaving costs him something physical, but he does it. He walks out of Marcy’s office, speaks to Remy in a low voice, then disappears through the newsroom toward the front door.
I watch until he’s gone.
Remy steps into the doorway a moment later, evidence bag in one hand and sympathy written all over his face. “You want to wait?”
I look at the article through the plastic. My name. My words. Preston’s marker trying to turn both into a lie.
Then I think about Ryder on his couch all night, choosing not to come upstairs.
I think about him leaving because I told him to.
I pick up my purse from the chair and wipe under one eye before my mascara can make a public statement.
“No,” I tell Remy. “Take me to file the report before I talk myself out of it.”