Chapter 33
I clocked her at the second light after I left the office, four cars back in a gray hatchback that had no business being on my route unless someone had told her exactly which streets I favored on a Tuesday morning.
Nobody had told her. She’d learned it the way she learned everything, by paying closer attention than most people bothered to pay to anything.
It wasn’t the car that gave her away first. It was the yellow.
Sneakers, glimpsed once through the windshield when she leaned forward to check her mirror, bright enough that I could pick them out at forty yards in bad morning light.
I knew those sneakers. I’d cataloged them the first week I ever watched her cross a courtyard, back when I still told myself the file was about Trent Holloway and not about the woman carrying a fake skeleton hand like it weighed nothing.
I made a turn I didn’t need to make, a lazy right onto a residential street that fed nowhere useful, just to see what she’d do with it.
She followed badly, holding the turn too long and dropping back another car length. Distance only helps if speed changes with it. She kept the hatchback at a steady thirty-one in a thirty.
I felt the smile before I decided to let it happen.
I took her past the office first, because I wanted to see what she’d do with Rourke Investigations sitting right there in plain lettering on the glass.
She slowed, didn’t stop, kept rolling like a woman who had absolutely not just confirmed the address she already had memorized from her own research.
There was something almost sweet in that, in watching her check a fact she already knew, and I filed it next to everything else I knew about how she moved when she thought no one was checking.
Then the diner, because I was hungry and because I wanted to know how long she’d sit in a parking lot pretending to check her phone.
Twenty minutes, as it turned out, long enough that her coffee, visible through the hatchback’s windshield when I walked back to my truck, had gone from steaming to still.
I ate a bad omelet and thought about her sitting out there patient and terrible at this, and the amusement had a warmth folded into it now, slow and unfamiliar, at the simple fact of being wanted enough to be followed badly.
Nobody waits through cold coffee for something they don’t care about.
Owen called while I was still in the lot.
“You’re being followed,” he said, no greeting, the way he answered every call that mattered.
“Gray hatchback, plates I don’t recognize, sat outside your building for eleven minutes this morning before you even left.
Took me a while to place it, I had my head down on another file all morning and only clocked it when your truck popped the same frame twice. ”
“I know. It’s Josie.”
A pause, long enough that I could hear him deciding how much to say. “You know it’s Josie, and you’re what, taking the scenic route?”
“I’m letting her run the tail. She’s not very good at it yet.”
“Yet.” He let that word sit there a second, doing its own quiet work. “Caleb, you understand you’re describing a woman practicing surveillance on you and you’re grading her homework instead of ending the exercise.”
“She’s not hurting anything.”
“No,” he said, “she’s not, and that’s really not the part I’m worried about.
” His voice dropped out of its usual dry register into something flatter, more direct than he generally let himself get with me.
“You’re grinning about this. I can hear it.
You love that she’s out there working this hard just to get a look at your Tuesday.
And you still haven’t given her a key to your house.
You told me that yourself, two nights ago, like it was a minor scheduling issue. ”
“It’s not the same thing.”
“It’s exactly the same thing, and you know it’s exactly the same thing, which is why you called it a minor scheduling issue instead of just saying no to me the way you apparently said no to her.
” He wasn’t raising his voice. Owen never raised his voice; that had never been how he made a point land.
“You like being wanted. I get it. It’s rare for you and it’s real and I’m not telling you to stop feeling good about it.
I’m telling you that enjoying her attention while you keep your own door locked isn’t caution, man.
It’s just hypocrisy with better manners. ”
I had no answer. “I have to go.” Owen let me close the door without pushing further.
I drove with the hatchback still four lengths back. By the time Mason Ridge came into range, the amusement was gone. I did not fear her. I feared seeing her curiosity reach my front door.
I didn’t decide to lose her so much as I found myself already doing it, hands moving the wheel before the rest of me had finished the argument, and even as I made the turn I knew it was still a choice, not an instinct, no matter how much I wanted to call it one.
Two turns, no signal, a cut through a strip mall lot that dumped onto a street running parallel to my own for half a mile before curling back toward the highway instead of toward home.
In the mirror the hatchback held straight at the intersection I’d abandoned, hesitated for one long second like she was deciding whether pride was worth the gas money, and then kept going straight, giving up the tail clean instead of forcing it.
She could have pushed through the light and made me work harder. She did not. She accepted a boundary I had not said aloud, showing more restraint than I had.
My phone rang before I’d finished processing any of it. Rachel’s name on the screen, my sister, and something about the timing made my stomach drop before I’d even answered, the way it used to drop when we were kids and the phone rang after nine at night.
“He’s outside my house,” she said, no hello, her voice pitched low and even in the way she’d taught herself to sound calm around instruments and machines that didn’t care how scared she was.
“Dad. He’s standing on my front lawn right now, Caleb, and I don’t know how long he’s going to stay there if I don’t go out and deal with it myself. ”