Chapter 20 Maren
I woke up first. I kissed Thomas awake, because he was nearest. I kissed Brady awake second, which was like booting up a parade.
"Best alarm clock on the west side," Brady murmured. "Top one. It's not close."
Damian lay on my other side with his eyes shut and his breathing suspiciously even.
"I'm asleep," he said.
"Your eyebrows are lying."
Nobody made it downstairs early, and Brady whistled all the way through making eggs.
We were at the table, the four of us, sun on the floorboards and Keith patrolling for fallen toast, when my phone rang.
"Detective Chen," I answered, bright.
"Maren." Detective Chen had two voices. One was the warm one. This was the other one. "I'd rather do this in person. Are you home this morning?"
The table had gone quiet around me. Three men, three faces, all reading me at once.
"We're home," I said.
Chen arrived within the hour with a folder under her arm. Brady opened the door for her. Thomas had already laid out four mugs and the good coffee, because Thomas processed dread through hospitality. Damian had his laptop open on the kitchen island before she'd taken off her jacket.
Chen settled onto a stool and opened the folder. "The lab finished the handwriting comparison. The orchid card, the package from the studio gate, both against a sample we pulled from an old small-claims filing." She looked up at me, and gave me the mercy of no preamble. "His name is Zack Reiss."
"Zack," I said. "I know him. I worked with him."
"Your second film," Chen said. "Vancouver. The summer shoot."
"The romcom. He played the guy I end up with."
Brady set down his coffee. His face had gone very still, which on Brady was the loudest thing in the room. "I paused on his name the first week," he said quietly. "Reading your filmography against the threat file. Something about his press photos. I told myself I was being paranoid."
"You weren't," Chen said. "He's thirty-eight now. He's lived in seven cities under five names."
"Albright and Kessler," Damian said, already typing.
"Two of the five. Your work's been good." Chen flipped a page. "Four priors across three jurisdictions. None of it aggregated, because he's been disciplined about moving on before any one department gets a full picture. He fixates, escalates, and then relocates."
I stood at my own counter and felt the kitchen tilt.
"There's something I never told anyone," I said. "Because I thought it was nothing. Because I made it nothing."
Thomas turned fully toward me. "Tell us now."
"We were shooting in Vancouver. I was twenty-two.
" I wrapped my hands around the mug Thomas slid in front of me, just to have something to hold.
"He came into my trailer one afternoon without knocking.
And he gave a speech. A rehearsed one. You can always tell when something's rehearsed, the rhythm's too clean.
He told me he was in love with me. That what we had on camera wasn't acting.
And then he asked if I felt the same way. "
"What did you say?" Brady asked, very softly.
"I said no. Kindly. The way you do at twenty-two when you're scared of being a problem.
" I stared into the coffee. "And his face went still.
Not hurt. Still. Like someone had switched something off behind it.
For years I told myself I'd exaggerated that memory, because I'm an actress and we embellish, that's the job.
" I looked up at the three of them. "I didn't exaggerate it. I underplayed it."
Chen went on. "The first teaser for Vanishing Acts is what set off this escalation. In his postings, he's decided the film is a message, to him. A coded address. He believes you've been speaking to him through your work for years, and that the hero of this film is, in some form, him."
"The hero of my stalker film," I said. "He thinks he's the hero."
"Men like Reiss are always the hero in their head," Chen said.
And that was the moment my legs filed their resignation. I felt it coming, the way you feel a wave at your back, and I did the only dignified thing available, which was to slide down the cabinet door until I was sitting on my own kitchen floor.
They converged. Nobody discussed it. Brady got there first, down on the tile beside me, my hand disappearing into both of his.
Thomas crouched at my other side, palms flat and warm on my knees, head ducked until his eyes were level with mine.
Damian came around the island and sat on my right and set his shoulder against my shoulder and simply stayed, a wall with a pulse.
"There's more," I said, because if I stopped now I'd never finish.
"A week after the trailer thing, I lost my next job.
I'd been attached to something, and then I was recast. They said scheduling.
" I felt Damian's jaw tighten where his temple rested near mine, a small tremor I could feel through bone.
"I was twenty-two. I thought that was just the business.
That's what I told myself all these years. "
Brady's thumb moved slowly across my knuckles, back and forth.
"Hey. Look at me." I looked at him. The jokes were gone off his face and what was underneath was very sure.
"We're with you. All three of us. We are not going anywhere. Not for the press cycle, not for the contract. We’re here for you. You hear me?"
I nodded.
"Good. Because I rank promises, and that one's number one."
Chen gave us a moment, then crouched to my eye level too, folder against her knee, and laid it out plainly. No solo exits, even into the garden, until further notice. Routes varied daily, Damian looping her department in on the alias trail, all mail and deliveries through Aegis.
"We'll find where he's hiding," Chen said. "Men this organized still have patterns. Patterns are how we get him."
"Fear with a name is a fear you can hunt," Damian said quietly, beside my ear. "We've been fighting fog all this time. He just became a man, and men can be found."
I sat on my kitchen floor, held up on three sides, and let myself understand that the half second had come and gone, the one Damian's director shot a beat too late, the one where you realize your life has already changed.
Back at age twenty-two, in a trailer in Vancouver, my life had changed and nobody had told me.
"Okay," I said finally, and squeezed Brady's hands, and let them pull me to my feet, all three of them at once.