CHAPTER FOUR
Nadia — What I Do With Fear
I am, by nature, a person who investigates.
It’s the thing Priya loves and hates about me in equal measure — that I don’t leave a strange feeling alone until I’ve turned it over enough times to see every side of it.
It’s why I paint water instead of anything that holds still.
It’s also, I’ll admit, why I didn’t call the police about a business card and a set of footsteps that had never actually touched me.
What would I even say — a man was polite to me and then left?
So I did what I always do instead. I got curious.
The card said VANE CAPITAL HOLDINGS in small gray letters I hadn’t noticed the first time, no address, just a phone number and the name.
I searched it that night, sitting cross-legged on my kitchen floor with my laptop because some detective instinct in me apparently required poor posture, and found almost nothing — a handful of real estate filings, a defunct nightlife venture from a decade ago, an address in the financial district that Google Maps showed as an empty storefront.
A man who owned nothing you could point to but had enough money to make a stranger uneasy just by handing her a card. That was somehow worse than if I’d found a scandal.
I called Priya instead of the number on the card, which felt like the more survivable decision.
“Show me,” she said, and I did, over video, holding the card up to my laptop camera like evidence in a trial only I was attending.
“Creepy rich guy syndrome,” she said finally. “I’ve dated two of them. They love doing the mysterious thing because it makes them feel like a movie.”
“He knew my name before I told him.”
“You’re a local artist with a show up right now, babe. It was probably in the gallery program.” A pause, because Priya noticed things too, even through a screen. “You’ve been weird all week. Weirder than the market.”
I told her about the footsteps. I hadn’t meant to — it came out sideways, in the middle of a sentence about something else entirely, the way real fear tends to surface when you’ve been holding it down too long.
She went quiet in the specific way she went quiet when she was deciding whether to be scared with me or scared for me, which were different things and she always chose carefully.
“Okay,” she said. “New rule. You text me when you leave anywhere after dark, and you text me when you get home. I don’t care if it’s annoying.”
“It’s not annoying.”
“It’s a little annoying. Do it anyway.”
I agreed, and felt safer for exactly as long as it took to hang up the phone, and then I was alone again in an apartment with thin walls and old locks, holding a business card from a man who’d found me before I’d found him, and no amount of rules with Priya was going to change the fact that somewhere out there, someone had decided I was worth watching.
I went to the gallery the next afternoon to ask Marguerite about the gallery program, because if Vane’s information really had come from something as ordinary as a printed handout, I needed that ordinary explanation the way I needed air.
“We didn’t print programs this year,” Marguerite said, barely looking up from the invoice she was squinting at. “Budget. Everything’s on the website.”
“So if someone knew my full name—”
“They looked it up, sweetheart, like everyone else.” She finally glanced at me properly, and whatever she saw made her set the invoice down. “What’s this about?”
I almost told her. I opened my mouth with the whole story sitting right there — the gallery, the coffee shop, the footsteps, the card — and what came out instead was, “Nothing. Just curious how the mailing list works.”
I don’t know why I lied. I think some part of me had already decided that saying it out loud, to someone who wasn’t Priya, would make it real in a way I wasn’t ready for.
Fear you keep to two people is still manageable.
Fear you tell a third person starts looking like a pattern, and patterns are the kind of thing you can’t argue yourself out of anymore.
I left the gallery through the back, out of habit, and the alley behind it was empty.
I stood there anyway for a moment, in the cold, doing the thing I’d started doing without deciding to — listening.
Just listening, to a city that gave nothing away, before I made myself walk out into the ordinary daylight and go home like a person who had nothing at all to be afraid of.