Chapter 2
Chapter
Two
HARPER
Three days in Summit Falls and nobody has asked for a selfie.
Nobody has shoved a phone in my face at the grocery store or followed me into a bathroom or screamed my name from across a parking lot like I owe them something for existing.
Nobody has recognized me at all, which is either a testament to the town's isolation or proof that my team was right.
Nobody looks for a pop star in a place that doesn't have a stoplight.
I'm sitting on the bench outside the Summit Inn eating a muffin Rachel Whitaker left outside my door this morning, and for the first time in six months, my chest doesn't feel like someone is standing on it.
The letters started in February. Fan mail is normal.
I've been getting it since I was sixteen, since the first single went viral and my face stopped belonging to me.
Most of it is sweet. Some of it is weird.
A few pieces every year are unsettling enough that my security team flags them and files a report.
These were different.
The first one described what I was wearing to a restaurant in LA on a Tuesday night. The second referenced the brand of shampoo in my shower. The third included a photograph of my bedroom window taken from across the street at two in the morning.
My team flagged all three. Filed reports. Increased perimeter. Installed cameras. Did everything right.
The letters kept coming. One a week, then two, then every other day. Each one more specific. More intimate. More certain that we belonged together, that I was playing hard to get, that my security was keeping us apart.
I cancelled the tour after letter number fourteen described what he would do to me when he finally got me alone.
My manager Leah handled the press. Family emergency, the statement said. Harper West looks forward to reconnecting with fans when the time is right. Stock language for a woman who sleeps with a light on and checks behind the shower curtain every morning.
The FBI is investigating. My private security team is running a parallel search. Leah chose Summit Falls because her college roommate grew up near here and said it was the kind of place where a person could vanish.
She wasn't wrong.
I take another bite of the muffin and watch Main Street wake up.
The woman who runs the gallery is unlocking her door with a toddler on her hip and a coffee in her free hand, moving with the practiced efficiency of someone who does this every single morning without variation.
Betty Russo is sweeping the sidewalk in front of the diner and arguing with a man twice her age about whether the pot roast needs more rosemary.
A truck pulls up to the general store and a rancher in worn boots carries two bags of feed like they weigh nothing.
Normal. All of it so aggressively, beautifully normal.
Then the man from the diner walks past.
He's hard to miss. Tall, broad, shaved head, the kind of build that comes from actual use rather than a gym membership.
Dark skin, dark eyes, a face that doesn't waste energy on expressions it doesn't mean.
He's carrying a paper bag from the general store and walking with the unhurried precision of someone who's never been late for anything in his life because he controls every variable in his environment.
Three days ago, he watched me from the diner counter while I ate a grilled cheese, and my first instinct was to bolt. Not because he looked dangerous. Because he looked like he saw me.
Not Harper West the brand. Not the wig or the sunglasses or the carefully constructed nobody I was trying to be. He looked at me the way my security team looks at a room before I enter it. Cataloguing. Assessing. Deciding whether the threat is real.
He decided I was safe. I saw it happen in real time. Watched his body language shift from alert to something quieter when he placed both hands flat on the counter.
That's not how regular people sit in diners.
He passes the inn without looking up, but his pace slows by a fraction as he crosses my sightline. Not enough for anyone else to notice. Enough for me.
I've been watched by professionals for eighteen years. I know the difference between someone who's looking at me and someone who's looking out for me.
"That's Dr. Reeves's nephew."
June Whitaker is standing in the inn doorway with her arms crossed and her silver hair catching the light. She's been running this inn for decades, and she has the energy of a woman who has seen every human drama play out in her lobby and decided most of them are entertaining.
"Dominic," she continues, because I didn't ask and she doesn't care. "Private security of some kind. Visiting his uncle for two weeks. Drinks his coffee black, tips thirty percent, and has been sitting on that porch every morning since he arrived like he's guarding it from bears."
"I wasn't asking."
"You were looking." She says it without judgment. "He's a good man. Michael's been trying to get him to visit for years."
She goes back inside, and I finish my muffin.
My phone buzzes. Leah.
Update from FBI. Still narrowing it down. Stay put. Stay low.
I type back:
Low as it gets.
The truth is, I don't know how to be low.
I've been high since I was sixteen. Studio sessions at seventeen.
First album at eighteen. World tour at nineteen.
Another album, another tour, another album, another tour, a cycle so relentless that I stopped distinguishing between years and just started counting by set lists.
I'm thirty-four years old, and I don't know how to sit on a bench without checking my phone for the next obligation.
Don't know how to eat a muffin without calculating whether someone is photographing me doing it.
Don't know how to watch a man walk down a street and just appreciate the view without wondering what he wants from me.
Everyone wants something.
My label wants another album. My manager wants me healthy enough to deliver it. My fans want access. My family wants money. The man sending letters wants my body or my death or whatever lives in the overlap between obsession and violence.
Nobody has asked me what I want in so long that I've stopped checking.
I stand up, brush crumbs off my jeans, and walk toward the diner because Betty's coffee is terrible and I'm developing an addiction to it.
Dominic is already inside. Same stool. Same sightline to the door. Same untouchable calm.
I take the booth in the corner again. Back to the wall.
He doesn't turn around, but I see his shoulders register my presence. A micro adjustment, the kind only someone trained in close protection makes. He knows where I am in the room without looking.
Betty brings my coffee. "Grilled cheese again?"
"Please."
"Honey, I make other things."
"I know. I like the grilled cheese."
She pats my hand once and disappears. The touch is so casual, so reflexive, that it takes me a second to process that a stranger just touched me with affection and I didn't flinch.
I drink my coffee. He drinks his. Betty moves between us like we're both regulars and she's been doing this for years.
My phone buzzes again. Not Leah this time. An unknown number.
I know you're not in LA.
My vision narrows. The coffee cup rattles against the saucer because my hands are shaking, and I set it down too hard and coffee sloshes over the rim.
I'm staring at the screen when a shadow falls across my table.
Dominic is standing there. Not looming. Not crowding. Just present, positioned between me and the window, blocking the sightline from the street.
"You're shaking," he says. Low voice. No inflection. Just fact.
"I'm fine."
"You're not." He pulls a napkin from the dispenser on my table and sets it next to the spilled coffee. "But you don't have to tell me why."
He goes back to his stool.
I wipe up the coffee with hands that won't stop trembling and forward the text to Leah with three words:
He found me.
Then I sit in a diner in Summit Falls, Colorado, and let the man at the counter guard the door without being asked.