2. New Girl in Town #2
That evening, I sat on my porch and watched the sun disappear through the magnolia tree.
The light turned golden, then amber, then a gorgeous purple-pink, the whole sky going soft, strange and beautiful.
The preserve beyond the property line grew darker, shadows pooling beneath the trees like spilled ink.
And I could swear I saw movement among the trees.
Shapes. Large shapes. Too large to be deer, moving with a fluid grace that didn't match any animal I knew. They wove between the trunks like they owned the darkness, like they'd been born to it. Three of them, I thought. Maybe four. Like wolves running in formation.
They disappeared into deeper darkness. Told myself it was nothing. Deer. Wild dogs. Shadows playing tricks in the dying light.
But my body knew something my mind wouldn't admit. My shoulders had crept up toward my ears. My hands had curled into fists without my permission. Somewhere deep in my psyche, the part that remembered what it meant to be prey, something was paying very close attention to those woods.
I made myself breathe. Forced myself to unclench. This was exactly the kind of hypervigilance my therapist in Atlanta had warned me about: the way trauma rewires your threat detection until everything feels dangerous, until you can't tell the difference between instinct and anxiety.
You're safe, I told myself. He doesn't know where you are. He can't find you here.
My phone buzzed.
Unknown number.
My heart knew before my eyes finished reading. That cold lurch in my chest, that instant sick certainty.
Serena.
Just my name. No greeting, no message. The sender ID was blocked, but it didn't matter. I knew that style. The economy of it. The way he liked to remind me he was still there, still watching, that distance was an illusion and I would never really escape.
The panic hit like a wave: fast, cold, total.
My vision narrowed to a tunnel. My chest tightened until breathing felt like work. I could feel my pulse in my throat, behind my eyes, in the tips of my fingers where they gripped the phone hard enough to hurt.
How did he get this number?
I'd been so careful. New phone, new carrier, new everything. Paid cash at a gas station outside Birmingham. Told no one except Tara and Janine. Did everything right, and it didn't matter. It never mattered. Because Marcus always found a way in.
That was his particular genius. Not outright violence, he was too smart for that, too careful about leaving marks. Just presence. Just the constant, suffocating reminder that I was never really alone, never really free, never really mine.
I blocked the number. Deleted the message.
How? The question clawed at me. I’d bought this phone with cash at a gas station outside Birmingham.
New carrier, new number, told no one except Tara and Janine.
Had he cloned my old SIM? Planted something on my laptop that scraped my contacts?
I turned the phone over in my hands, fighting the urge to throw it out the window.
But if I ditched it, I’d lose my only connection to Tara. To anyone.
Sat in the dark for a long time, arms wrapped around my knees, trying to remember how to breathe.
He can't find me here, I told myself. I was careful. I left no trail.
But I'd told myself that before. In Atlanta, in the apartment I'd thought was safe, the one with the new locks, the security system, and the restraining order still working its way through the courts. I'd told myself I was careful then, too.
Then I'd woken up with a rose on my pillow.
The memory hit like a fist: white petals against my pillowcase, the ghost of his cologne in the air, the sick certainty that he'd been there while I slept.
That he could have done anything. That the locks, alarms and all my careful planning meant nothing against someone who believed, with absolute conviction, that I belonged to him.
Below, the back door of the main house opened.
A shape moved across the yard. Tall, dark, broad, moving with that predatory grace I was starting to associate with the oldest brother. He paused at the edge of the preserve, head tilted, and I could swear he was scenting the air. Reading it the way you'd read a page.
No. Not scenting. Listening. That's what people did.
But his eyes caught the moonlight wrong. A flash of gold where there should have been dark brown, there and gone so fast I couldn't be sure I'd seen it at all.
He turned. And even in the dark, even from this distance, I felt the weight of his attention land on me. Not hostile. Not threatening. Just aware. Like he'd known I was there all along, had been tracking me the way I'd been tracking the shadows in the trees.
For a strange, suspended moment, I didn't feel afraid.
As if something in me recognized something in him. As if I weren’t meant to be here in this moment…
Then my phone buzzed again, Tara checking in, and the spell broke.
I was just a woman on a porch. He was just a man in a yard. And I was exhausted, paranoid, seeing things that weren't there because that's what happened when you spent three years learning to fear.
I went inside. Locked the door.
Checked it twice.
But as I turned away from the window, I noticed something I'd missed before. On the sill, where the moonlight pooled like spilled milk, there was a single white rose petal.
My hands went cold.
I hadn't brought roses. I hadn't unpacked flowers of any kind. And when I'd checked the apartment earlier, that sill had been empty.
I checked it twice more. The deadbolt. The chain. The windows.
Sleep, when it finally came, was thin and restless. And in the morning, when I looked again, the petal was gone, as if it had never been there at all.