6. Alex
Alex
“I’m going to the store,” Belle says, already at the elevator.
I look up from a contract I’ve read four times without retaining a word. “I’ll have the car brought around.”
“I want to walk.”
“It’s raining.”
“It’s drizzling.” She pulls her umbrella from the stand, the collapsible one she brought from Pinehaven, five dollars of dented aluminum beside umbrellas that cost more than her old rent. “I’ll be back in an hour.”
“Take the car.”
“Ok.”
Something is wrong with Belle.
She has been miserable since she came here. That was the point. I wanted to wear her down until she ran out of places to hide and finally told me what happened ten years ago.
But this is different.
Every day she gets quieter. She barely looks at me now, and the more frightened she becomes, the harder she clings to whatever she is hiding.
Last night, her eyes were swollen when I came home. Red around the edges. She had been crying, though she denied it when I asked. I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake the truth out of her.
Instead, she locked herself in her room.
I had no choice but to go into the office this morning.
Work had piled up while I stayed home with her, and I could not postpone the meetings again.
I made Cami cram an entire week into one day while Danny carried everything else he could.
By the time I came home, I was exhausted, but I had cleared enough space to work from the penthouse for another three days.
One day away from her.
That was all it took.
She looks worse than she did yesterday, and now she is rushing for the door at the first opportunity, as though being anywhere near me has become unbearable.
Frank calls exactly five minutes after Belle leaves. “She turned down the car, Mr. Hartley. She’s walking east on Ross.”
“Stay on her. Far enough away that she doesn’t spot you.”
“Already am.” I hang up.
I am not going to follow her. I have a security detail on retainer and a board call in an hour. I recite all of it while pulling a black sweatshirt over my head and trading my shoes for a quieter pair.
I pull up my hood before I step outside.
The drizzle seeps through the cotton almost immediately, cold against my hair and the back of my neck. The doorman barely glances at me. I own this building and the two beside it, yet dressed like this, I could be any man cutting through the rain with nowhere important to be.
I find Belle four blocks away.
She walks beneath a black umbrella, her head bowed against the weather.
She still hasn’t looked behind her, but she looks everywhere else.
At the first intersection, her gaze flicks across the reflection in a parked SUV.
At the next corner, she stops to adjust a shoelace that is already tied and finally checks the pavement behind her through the gap beneath her arm.
A sedan idles too long at a green light. Belle’s grip tightens around the umbrella until traffic carries the car away.
When a man comes up too close behind her, she crosses the street, waits beside a bus shelter, then returns to her original route once he continues straight.
I know exactly what she is doing.
I pay men obscene amounts of money to notice reflections, alter their pace, and record any vehicle that remains in sight for one block too many.
Countersurveillance.
It has no place in the life of a small-town art teacher who bakes part-time and now cooks my meals.
Yet Belle moves as though she has spent years expecting someone to follow her.
She passes the market closest to the penthouse without slowing.
Marble floors, imported produce, my account already attached to the address.
Instead, she walks another three blocks east.
The neighborhood changes around her. Metal grates cover the pawnshop windows. Warm air carrying detergent rolls out of a laundromat. A handwritten sign outside a taquería curls in the rain.
Belle stops beneath the yellow awning of a bodega, shakes the water from her umbrella, and goes inside.
I wait across the street, beneath a bus shelter.
Rain trails down the glass between us. Through it, I watch her move along the narrow aisles as though she has done it a hundred times.
The woman behind the counter looks to be in her fifties. She sees Belle and smiles in recognition.
Belle says something. The woman laughs.
Then Belle smiles at her.
A real smile.
I spent two years walking into the same library for the chance to earn that smile, and she gives it to a woman behind a cash register while holding a basket of groceries. Jealousy settles hot and unreasonable beneath my ribs. I am standing in the rain resenting a woman for making Belle smile.
At the register, she separates everything into two piles.
Flour, eggs, vegetables, dish soap.
Then shampoo, antacids, and a bag of cat food.
She pays for the groceries with the black card I gave her. For the smaller pile, she takes an old debit card from her wallet.
The woman runs it.
Frowns.
Tries again.
Then slides it back across the counter.
Belle’s shoulders sink barely half an inch.
No one else would notice.
I do.
I know why it failed.
I put the flag on her account before she ever arrived in Dallas. Nothing obvious enough for her bank to find. No hold they could remove after one phone call. Just enough interference to make her money inaccessible whenever she tried to use it.
The card I gave her has no limit. She knows that. Yet she has divided the basket into what she considers mine and what she refuses to let me buy. Does she think shampoo is where my generosity ends? Or is this another boundary she has drawn between us? My money for anything required to serve me.
Her own money for everything that belongs only to her.
I wanted her dependent on me.
I wanted her to understand that every meal, every roof, every mile of freedom came through my hands.
Watching the card fail should satisfy me.
For one ugly second, it does.
Then Belle takes out her phone.
The woman gestures toward the rejected items, then waves toward the door. Universal sign of asking Belle to take them and pay next time.
Belle shakes her head.
The woman insists.
Belle refuses again, thanks her twice, and pushes the shampoo, antacids, and cat food back across the counter.
Pride wins even when it costs her. She will go without before she lets me pay for them.
The refusal irritates me almost as much as it fills me with pride.
She has spent ten years living under another name, yet this stubborn piece of her survived intact.
Whatever else Belle did, she did not disappear for money.
A woman willing to abandon everything for a fortune would not humiliate herself over a bottle of shampoo rather than use a card with no limit.
The thought shifts something I have kept nailed down for a decade.
The cashier gives her a sympathetic look. Belle manages a tight smile in return, gathers the household groceries and steps into the rain with the phone pressed to her ear.
Whoever she is speaking to has all her attention. Her free hand cuts through the air as her voice rises above the traffic. I cannot make out the words, but I know an argument when I see one.
I cross behind her and get closer at the next corner.
“I’m standing at the merchant's now,” she says. Frustration sharpens every word. “The card was declined again.”
She listens.
“No. The cashier tried it twice.”
A bus passes between us, spraying water across the curb. By the time it clears, Belle has moved toward the alley beside the bodega.
“I already gave you the reference number.”
Traffic swallows her next response.
Belle presses the phone harder to her ear. “I followed every instruction you gave me. I came back, tried it at the terminal and called while I was still here. Please don’t tell me to do the same thing again.”
Her voice rises.
A delivery truck brakes hard at the intersection.
Belle flinches and glances around, suddenly aware of how exposed she is. She ducks into the alley beside the bodega, sets the grocery bag on a milk crate, and puts the call on speaker while she searches through her purse.
That is when I see him.
He steps away from the wall near the far end of the alley.
Dark jacket. Baseball cap pulled low. His hands hang loose at his sides.
He moves toward Belle at an angle, closing the distance without approaching directly.
Thirty feet.
His attention never shifts to the open purse or the wallet visible inside it.
Twenty.
Belle is arguing with the bank representative, one hand digging through receipts.
The man’s right hand slips into his pocket.
Fifteen.
I pull out my phone and trigger the emergency alert to Frank.
Ten.
The man angles across the mouth of the alley, cutting off Belle’s route to the street.
His hand comes out of his pocket.
Empty.
He reaches for her upper arm.
I run.
My shoulder hits him before his fingers close.
We slam into the brick wall. Skin tears from my knuckles.
He drives an elbow beneath my ribs.
The air leaves my lungs, but I catch the front of his jacket and wrench him back. He turns with the pull and punches me across the mouth.
Copper coats my tongue.
The man swings again. I take the hit across my cheek, step inside his reach, and drive my fist into his nose. Cartilage gives beneath my knuckles, and blood spills over his mouth.
I hit him again.
His fist hooks into my ribs, once and then lower the second time, hard enough to make my knee dip. He shoves me into the dumpster and tries to move around me.
Toward Belle.
I catch the back of his jacket and drag him down. We hit the wet pavement together. His fist clips my ear, and the sound drops out on one side.
Belle screams my name, but she sounds too far away.
I force my forearm across his throat. “Who sent you?”
He claws at my sleeve, twisting beneath me.
“Who the fuck sent you?”
His forehead slams into my split lip. Pain flashes white, and my grip loosens just long enough for him to get one foot beneath him.
Belle lunges for his sleeve.
Brave. Reckless.