Total pages in book: 110
Estimated words: 106090 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 530(@200wpm)___ 424(@250wpm)___ 354(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 106090 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 530(@200wpm)___ 424(@250wpm)___ 354(@300wpm)
He’s watching her place. Same spot I saw him last night, give or take twenty feet.
This time I get more. The streetlight catches ink on his neck, dark lines crawling up past his collar toward his jaw. He’s not wearing the hood tonight, but he’s angled away from me, face in shadow. I can make out dark hair, a lean build. Wiry, like a distance runner, someone you’d underestimate right up until you couldn’t. But the rest is just impression. If I passed him on the street tomorrow, I’m not sure I’d know him. All I’ve really got is the tattoos and the way he carries himself.
I take a step toward him.
He’s already moving. Not running, not rushing, just gone. Around the corner and into the darkness like smoke dispersing.
By the time I reach the spot where he’d been standing, the street is empty. I scan doorways, parked cars, the gaps between buildings. Nothing. Whoever this guy is, he knows how to vanish when he needs to.
I stand there for a long moment, breathing hard, hands flexing at my sides. Close. I was so close.
The walk back to my car feels longer than it should. I drive home on autopilot, and by the time I’m sitting at my kitchen table with the leather notebook open in front of me, the want has curdled into darkness. Something that won’t let me sleep.
I flip backward through the pages. Months of observations. Months of documenting every detail of her life like a man possessed.
October 3. She stayed late at the studio, left at 9:47. Stopped for Thai food on Smith Street. Nothing unusual.
October 17. Late night walk through the Village. Alone, no destination. Walked home alone. I followed from two blocks back.
November 2. She looked over her shoulder three times on her walk home. I thought she’d clocked me.
I pause on that entry. Thought she’d clocked me. I know better now. She told me tonight, standing in the snow with her fingers curled into my coat, that she’s known for weeks. Maybe longer. She let me follow her. Wanted me to.
All those nights I congratulated myself on being invisible, she was playing me like a violin.
The thought should bother me more than it does. Instead, I find myself smiling in the dark of my kitchen, remembering the look on her face when she admitted it. No shame. No accusation. Just that spark in her eyes, like we’d been dancing this whole time and she was finally letting me know she’d been leading.
I keep flipping through the notebook, but now I’m looking for something else. Moments when her attention might have snagged on something other than me. Times when she seemed nervous, distracted, spooked by shadows I wasn’t casting.
There. November 15. She stopped at her mailbox and stood there for almost a minute, just staring at something in her hand. When she went inside, she left the lobby light on all night.
And here. November 28. She took a different route home. Doubled back twice. I thought she was testing me, but her shoulders were tight the whole walk. She looked over her shoulder six times in ten blocks.
Something about it doesn’t sit right. She knew I was there—she’s told me as much. So why the tension? Why the doubling back? It wasn’t for my benefit.
I close the notebook and open my laptop instead. When Hailey first started working for Sloane, I ran a background check. Clean record, solid employment history, good references. Nothing that raised flags.
But I only went back three years, and tonight I go further.
Five years ago, Hailey Parker appeared in New York. Got an apartment in Brooklyn. Started working freelance jewelry gigs, built a portfolio, climbed the ladder until she landed with Sloane. A clean trajectory that makes perfect sense on paper.
Before that? Nothing.
I’ve seen this before. Helped create it, back in my contractor days, for people who needed to disappear. It takes money and motivation and usually a very good reason to erase yourself so completely.
Hailey Parker is a ghost who became a person five years ago, and now there’s a man with tattooed skin watching her apartment at night.
The roses bother me more now than they did before. I already knew they weren’t from me—figured that out the first night I saw him standing across from her building. But back then I assumed it was just some random guy who’d fixated on her, someone harmless leaving flowers like a lovesick teenager. Now I’m not so sure.
Now I’m wondering if whoever’s leaving those roses knew her before she became Hailey Parker. If he’s part of whatever she erased five years ago when she built herself a new life from nothing.
She still thinks they’re from me. Still has them hanging in her kitchen window, dried and preserved like love letters. I should have told her the truth that first night. Should have warned her.