CHAPTER FIVE
Kael — The Rule I Break
There’s a rule I made for myself four years ago, in a hospital hallway that smelled like antiseptic and failure, and it has exactly one clause: never let her see you twice.
Once is an accident. A stranger at a coffee shop, footsteps on a dark street, a shape at the edge of a gallery — all of it deniable, all of it the kind of thing a rational mind explains away by morning. Twice is a pattern. Twice is the beginning of a face she’ll start looking for.
I broke it on a Wednesday, and I’d like to say it was a mistake. It wasn’t. I made a decision, the way I make all my worst ones, in about four seconds, weighing everything I know about caution against everything I’ve stopped being able to control.
She was at the small market two blocks from her building, the overpriced one with the good produce, and Vane’s man — the one who’d been circling for a week, the one I’d chased off the street and hadn’t been able to identify past a build and a gait — was standing in the cereal aisle pretending to read a label he’d been holding upside down for four minutes.
I could have called it in. I have people for exactly this.
Instead I walked into that market and stood close enough behind her in the checkout line that she’d feel me before she saw me, because I needed Vane’s man to see, clearly, unmistakably, that she wasn’t alone, and I needed him to see it from someone who looked capable of making him regret being there.
He left without buying anything. I’ll take that as a professional courtesy.
She turned around before I could leave.
I’d rehearsed this a hundred times in my head over four years and none of the rehearsals prepared me for the actual weight of her eyes finding mine and staying there, the way you’d look at something you already half-recognized and couldn’t place.
Up close she was worse than I’d let myself admit from a distance — not more beautiful, though she was that too, but more present, like she took up more space in a room than her body accounted for.
“Do I know you?” she asked. Not afraid. Curious, and underneath the curiosity, something sharper. Suspicious in a way that told me she’d been paying closer attention than I’d given her credit for.
“No,” I said, which was almost true, and walked out before I did something unforgivable, like tell her the truth.
Nadia — The Voice I Can’t Place
I’ve replayed that sentence more times than I want to admit to anyone, including myself.
No.
One syllable, low, unhurried, entirely too calm for a man a stranger had just turned around and confronted in a grocery store.
Most people, caught like that, stumble through an apology or an excuse — sorry, wrong person, you looked like someone I know.
He didn’t do any of that. He just answered the question I asked, exactly and only that question, and left like the conversation was already over before it started.
I stood in that checkout line with my heart going too fast for a purchase of oat milk and a rotisserie chicken, watching the door swing shut behind a man I was suddenly, unshakably certain I’d felt behind me before — at the gallery, at the coffee shop, on that street two Fridays ago when footsteps that weren’t mine had matched my pace stride for stride.
Same height. Same stillness. Something about the way he held himself like he was accustomed to not being noticed and slightly thrown by the fact that, this time, he had been.
I didn’t call Priya from the store. I called her from my own kitchen, twenty minutes later, once I’d stopped shaking enough to make my voice sound normal.
“I think I know what he looks like now,” I said, and told her everything — the checkout line, the eyes, the flat impossible calm of that single word.
“Okay, that’s — Nadia, that’s not creepy rich guy syndrome anymore. That’s actually alarming.” A pause, papers shuffling on her end; she was already doing the thing she did when she got scared, which was become extremely practical. “You’re staying at mine tonight.”
“I have a show tomorrow, I can’t—”
“Then I’m coming to you. Don’t argue with me about this one.”
I didn’t argue. I sat by my window after we hung up, waiting for her to arrive, and looked down at the street the way I had every night for two weeks now, half hoping and half dreading that I’d see him there — the man with the too-calm voice, standing in the dark like he had every right to be, watching a life he had no part in.
The street was empty. It didn’t make me feel better. I was starting to understand that an empty street didn’t mean anything anymore, except that he’d gotten better at not being seen than I had at looking.