CHAPTER TWO
Nadia — Coincidence, Singular
By Tuesday I’d convinced myself I’d imagined the whole thing, which is what I always do with fear — argue it down until it fits in a drawer I can close.
The gallery show was still up, which meant I still had to go in twice a week to make sure nobody had spilled wine on the pier painting, and Marguerite, who owned the space and treated every canvas like a foster child she was personally responsible for, insisted on walking the room with me each time like we might find something new to say about work that had already been finished for months.
“Sold three more Saturday,” she said, tapping a red dot beside a smaller piece near the door. “The low-tide one’s got a hold on it. Some collector’s assistant called about it twice.”
“Twice?”
“People get excited.” She shrugged, already moving on to the next wall, already bored of the subject. I wasn’t.
I didn’t think about it again until Thursday, when I went to my usual coffee place on Ninth — the one with the good window light and the barista who’d stopped asking my name because I’d been coming for three years — and found a stranger sitting at my table.
Not my assigned table. I don’t own it. But I have a paint-stained sketchbook’s worth of mornings that say otherwise, and something in me flinched at seeing someone else’s coffee cup where mine usually sat.
He didn’t look up when I came in. Dark coat, again, though it was warm enough that the coat itself felt deliberate rather than practical.
A book open in front of him that he wasn’t reading — I noticed that before I noticed anything else, the stillness of a page that hadn’t turned in the time it took me to order and wait.
I took the table by the window instead, told myself it didn’t matter, and spent forty minutes trying not to look at a stranger’s profile while pretending to sketch the street outside.
He left before I did. Didn’t finish his coffee.
Left a twenty on the table for what couldn’t have been more than an eight-dollar tab, and by the time I worked up the nerve to say something — anything, even just “you’re in my seat,” which would have been both true and insane to a stranger — the door had already swung shut behind him.
“You okay?” Priya, texting, because she was always somewhere I was even when she wasn’t. You seem weird lately.
I’m fine, I wrote back, which was a lie with good posture.
The second coincidence, if that’s still the word for it, happened Friday night, and it was the one that finally cracked the argument I’d been building all week.
I was walking home from Priya’s — later than I meant to be, later than I usually let myself walk alone, but it was six blocks and I’d made the trip a hundred times — when I heard footsteps behind me fall into step with mine.
Not following. Matching. There’s a difference, and my body knew it before my mind caught up, the same cold drop in my stomach from the gallery all over again.
I didn’t turn around. I did what every woman is taught to do and hates herself a little for needing to know: I sped up, and the footsteps sped up exactly enough to stay the same distance behind, no more, no less, like whoever it was had done this before and understood precisely how close was close enough to be felt without being close enough to be blamed.
I turned the corner onto my street too fast, keys already in my fist the way my mother taught me before I was old enough to understand why she was teaching it, and when I looked back —
Nothing. An empty sidewalk. A man half a block down walking a dog in the opposite direction, entirely uninterested in me. No one else.
I stood in my doorway for a full minute before I made myself go inside, hating that I couldn’t tell if I’d just been followed or if four years of living alone in this city had simply taught my nervous system to invent monsters out of nothing, so it would always have something to be ready for.
I didn’t sleep well. Around 2 a.m. I got up and looked out the window, and there was no car across from the bodega, no shape in a doorway, nothing at all except the ordinary dark — which should have made me feel better, and instead made me feel like I’d been looking in the wrong direction the whole time.
Kael — What I Won’t Apologize For
She almost caught me at the coffee shop. I let her, a little. That’s the part I’d deny if anyone asked, if anyone were in a position to ask, if there were a version of my life where I answered to someone other than myself.
I’ve read the same page of that book eleven times this week.
I couldn’t tell you a word of it. I could tell you the exact moment her expression changes when she’s decided not to say something — a small flattening around the mouth, like she’s folding the sentence up and putting it away for later use against herself instead of me.
I could tell you she takes her coffee with too much milk and not enough sugar and drinks it too fast for someone who claims, loudly, to Priya Okafor, on a call I shouldn’t have overheard and did anyway, that she’s “not really a coffee person, more of a coffee-adjacent person.”
I left the twenty because I didn’t trust myself to wait for change. I’ve gotten careless. Four years of never being seen and in one week she’s felt me twice.
The second time was worse, and it was my fault in a way the first wasn’t.
I wasn’t the only one on that street Friday night.
That’s the sentence I’ve been avoiding writing even here, in the version of the truth I only tell myself in the dark, alone, in a car that isn’t registered to any name that would mean anything to her.
There was someone else behind her before I got there — a shape I clocked from the mouth of the alley two blocks back, moving with the particular unhurried confidence of a man who’s done this kind of following before and isn’t worried about being caught at it.
I closed the distance without thinking. My footsteps behind hers weren’t an accident; they were a decision, made in under two seconds, to become the danger she could feel so she wouldn’t have to feel the one she couldn’t.
I matched her pace because I needed her scared enough to run and not so scared she’d scream, needed the other man to see there was already a predator on this particular ground and decide the risk wasn’t worth it.
It worked. He peeled off before she reached the corner.
She’ll never know he existed. She’ll only know that I did — a set of footsteps in the dark that could have been anything, that she’ll spend the next week trying to explain away, because the alternative is admitting someone this deliberate is real, and once you admit that, you can’t stop checking the locks.
I watched her stand in her doorway for a full minute before she went inside.
I wanted, with an intensity that scared me more than the man in the alley had, to cross the street and tell her everything — his face, his name if I had one yet, every reason she should be afraid and every reason she should let me be the one standing between her and it.
I didn’t. I’ve learned, the hard way, exactly what happens to people I tell the truth to too soon.
So I sat outside her building until the light in her bedroom window went dark, and I told myself — the way I’ve been telling myself for four years, the lie getting thinner every time I use it — that this was still about keeping her safe, and not about the unbearable fact that I no longer know how to want anything else.