The Only One Watching Me (You Chose Her. Now Grovel.)

Chapter 1

The folder was green, and it had cost her ninety cents.

Laura had bought it in March at the drugstore on Harding, in a stack of five, because buying one would have looked like a thing.

Five looked like errands. She had put the other four in the desk drawer in the front room, where they were still sitting, and she had taken this one upstairs and started writing in it.

Now it lay on the kitchen island in the last of the afternoon light. She had it open to the third page. She was reading her own handwriting the way she used to read a chart before a patient came in, looking for the pattern under the notes.

She had underlined that one twice, back in April, and she could still remember doing it. She remembered standing at this counter with a pen and pressing hard enough to score the page below.

Seven months. It filled nine pages now, front and back.

Laura closed the folder and squared it against the edge of the marble. Then she said the sentence out loud, to the empty kitchen, in the flattest voice she owned.

"Someone has been following me since March."

It sounded insane. That was the trouble. Every version of it sounded either insane or like a bid for something, and in this house a woman asking for attention was a category of person, and everybody knew what to do with her.

She tried it again. "I need you to look at something and not do anything about it yet."

Better. That was better, because that was the actual fear, and she had known it for months without saying it.

She was not afraid of telling Jake. She was afraid of what would happen the minute after she told him.

He would call Gary. Gary would call somebody.

By Monday there would be a man in a golf shirt sitting in a car at the end of the drive, and a plan she had not been asked about, and a version of the story that had already been agreed on before anyone asked her a single question.

She had lived in his world for ten years. She knew exactly how it handled things.

And she knew what she would sound like when she said it, because she knew what she was now. A woman with a great deal of time.

That was the part she never said out loud to anybody.

Her days had a shape, and the shape was air.

She got up. She swam, because the pool was there.

She went to the market she liked in Green Hills instead of the one that was closer.

She answered mail for the foundation that had his name on it, which took a morning a week and could have been done by anyone, and once a month she sat in a meeting where men explained her husband's money to her in a slow voice.

Four years since she had put her hands on a patient.

It had gone one piece at a time. First the travel — you can't hold a caseload and be in Kansas City on a Sunday.

Then the season she gave up her hours to be at the games, which was one season, which turned out to be four.

Then the license, which she had let lapse in a week she could not now remember, and which had felt at the time like paperwork and not like an amputation.

She still read the journals. She still knew, watching a man cross a parking lot, exactly which hip was lying to him.

Nobody had taken it. That was the thing she could not get anyone to understand, including herself. She had handed it over in pieces, and every piece had been reasonable at the time.

But it was October now, and the notes had started coming closer together, and on the last day of September she had come out of the market and found her driver's-side mirror turned in to face the door. Not broken. Turned. Somebody had stood there and adjusted it with their hand and walked away.

So. Tonight.

The doorbell chimed at five, which was Derek, because Derek came on Thursdays.

"Hey, Mrs. H." He came in the side door with his phone already out.

He was a small, neat kid in a fleece vest with the network logo on it, and he had worked for her husband for four years, and she had never once seen him without a phone in his hand.

"Sorry. I know it's late. Your calendar was fighting me again. "

"Was it."

"The shared one keeps un-sharing itself. It's a permissions thing." He set his bag on the stool and took her phone off the charger without asking, because he had been taking her phone off the charger without asking for two years and neither of them thought about it anymore. "Two minutes."

"Do you want water?"

"I'm good."

She watched him work. He had a way of standing that took up no room at all. She thought, not for the first time, that she had never learned one thing about him — not where he lived, not whether he had anybody, nothing. He had been at their table at Christmas. She had signed his name on a card.

"There." He handed the phone back, screen up. "You've got the thing at the Cumberland Club on the twenty-second and then his October is a wall. I moved the trainer to Fridays."

"Thank you, Derek."

"Sure." He was already at the door. Then he stopped, half turned, and looked at the counter. "New folder?"

Her stomach did something small and cold.

"Insurance," she said. "The roof."

"Ah." He smiled. He had a nice smile, the kind you don't remember. "Tell him about the roof, not me. I'm not allowed to spend money."

The door shut. She stood with her phone in her hand and her heart going, and she made herself name it, the way she made patients name things. That was nothing. That was a kid being friendly about a folder. Seven months of this and she jumped at a boy in a fleece vest.

She put the folder in the drawer under the mail. Then she took it out again and put it back on the counter, because hiding it was how a person started lying.

Jake texted at 6:20.

flight got pushed. don't wait up.

She looked at it for a while.

He had left for Charlotte on Tuesday morning for a network thing, three days of it, and he was supposed to be wheels-down at four-forty and through the door by six.

She had built the whole evening on six. She had planned what she would say while he was still taking his shoes off, because Jake Hayes could talk his way out of any room he was given time in, and the only way to say a hard thing to her husband was to say it before he had his footing.

ok, she sent. Then, because she was thirty-four and not fifteen: I want to talk to you tomorrow. Nothing bad. Just talk.

Three dots. Then they stopped. Then they came back.

sounds serious

It's not.

ok. love you

She put the phone face down and stood there a second, and something in her chest went slack and disappointed and then, underneath it, quietly relieved, which she did not like at all. A whole week of working up to a sentence, and she had just been given a night off from saying it.

She cooked anyway, which she did badly and enjoyed.

Chicken and rice and a pan of green beans she overcooked on purpose because that was how her mother had made them.

The kitchen was the size of the whole first floor of the house on Quarry Road.

There was a second oven she had never turned on.

There was a wine fridge with a glass door and a light inside, and Jake had not had a drink in the house since April, and neither of them had mentioned that either.

That was the marriage now. A list of things neither of them mentioned.

It had not always been the list. She made herself remember the other part while the rice went, because it was true too, and because when she finally walked into that conversation she wanted to do it as a whole person and not as a grievance.

She had met him in a rehab gym on Thompson Lane when she was twenty-four and he was twenty-six and had a shoulder everybody was worried about and a neck nobody had looked at.

Everyone got his attention by telling him he was great.

Laura had put his file down and said, "You're compensating with your neck, and the neck is going to be the thing that retires you, not the shoulder.

" He had laughed at her. Then he had come back on Thursday.

Then he had come back every Thursday for four months, and on the last one he had asked her out in front of two trainers and a rookie, and she had said no. He had asked again the next week.

Ten years married in June. Two championships. Three surgeries. And then the neck, the way she had told him it would be when he was twenty-six, C5 to C6, fused, and a doctor in a room in Pittsburgh saying the words not advisable while Jake looked at the wall.

He was thirty-four. That was the part nobody outside understood. He had not lost a job. He had lost the only fact about himself.

The eighteen months after that were the worst of her life, and she had loved him through all of them, and she had believed — right up until this afternoon, standing at this counter with a ninety-cent folder — that they had come out the other side.

At 9:40 she covered his plate and put it in the warming drawer, because she had cooked it and there was no sense in the pan going to waste.

At 10:15 she took it out and scraped it into the trash, which was petty and felt good.

Then she went upstairs and washed her face and put on the sweatshirt from the university she had gone to, which was gray and enormous and older than the marriage and had a hole in the cuff.

She came back down and sat on the stool beside the folder and practiced the sentence one more time, for tomorrow, and then she stopped practicing because it was starting to sound like a person doing an impression of herself.

The phone rang at 11:40.

Tammy. Which was strange, because Tammy went to bed at nine like a farmer.

"Hey," Laura said.

Nothing. Just the sound of a room.

"Tammy?"

"Are you by yourself?" Tammy's voice was wrong. It was low and careful and had none of her in it.

Laura stood up. "What happened. Is it your mom?"

"No. Honey." A breath. "Are you sitting down. Is Jake there?"

"He's in Charlotte till tomorrow." The cold started at the back of her neck and went down. "Tammy, say it."

"There's pictures."

"Pictures."