Does it scare you that I watch you when you sleep?
Does it frighten you that I inhale you when you’re close?
Sometimes it terrifies me how intensely I feel about you.
There are three rules to successful stalking. One: Stay out of sight. Two: Be discreet. Three: Don’t drive a car that your stalkee would recognize. Apparently Noah hadn’t read the handbook, because he was breaking all three rules. But I would not be shaken by a man who didn’t even know how to properly stalk me.
I had just finished my afternoon laps in the pool, minus a few due to pregnancy fatigue, and had thrown on my cover-up and sandals. The mailman had just made his rounds, and I couldn’t wait to open the package of custom baby onesies I had ordered online. Harper called them extravagant, I called them adorable.
The path along the side of the house led to the driveway, where the mailman had left the package. I picked it up and headed toward the mailbox to grab the rest of the mail. Across the street an old man sat on his John Deere riding mower, zipping up and down his lawn wearing nothing but jeans, a cowboy hat, and his wrinkled skin for a shirt. Two doors down a Chihuahua yipped frantically at a car parked in front of the house. Something felt familiar about the car. A black sedan, strikingly similar to the one from the hair salon. Although it faced away from me, I could make out a silhouette in the front seat.
How blatantly suspicious.
I had just about enough of this crap, and I was fuming for a confrontation. Noah’s passive-aggressive threats were no match for the new me. The stalking, the text, now showing up at my house! Hell no. I had endured his fists, his anger, his fake apologies for years. No more! Since leaving him, I had found the fight within me, and I was finally ready to use it.
Tugging my cover-up down to hide my bikinied rear end, I marched across the street toward the car, my sandals angrily flapping against the concrete. The suburban cowboy watched me storm past his freshly mown lawn and lustily leered—yuck—and the dog ran to the corner of its yard nearest to me, still yipping, but stopped at the edge of the grass, as if held back by an invisible fence.
The sideview mirror was angled away from the driver’s face, and the sunlight streaking across his window sliced him into fragmented shadows. By the time I reached the bumper I was jogging, my sandals nearly sliding off my feet with each step as I clung to the mail with both hands. When I closed in on the back door of the car, he took off, his tires squealing, leaving a black patch of tread in their wake. The mail dropped to the sidewalk as I flipped him off with both hands.
“Coward!” I yelled at his blinking taillights as he took the turn off my street, blowing through the stop sign with barely a pause.
I stomped all the way back to the house, ready to call Noah to give him a piece of my mind. I wondered if he had changed his phone number, considering the text I received came from a blocked number. It wouldn’t matter; I still had his parents’ digits memorized. When I blew into the living room, slamming the front door behind me, a faint whimper echoed from the dining room. I peeked in and found Harper crying at the dining room table, a piece of paper soaked in tears beneath her elbows and a bottle of wine with only a mouthful left swirling around the bottom. No wineglass? This was bad. It was hard to stay angry at a sobbing woman.
“Hey, you okay?” I asked, grabbing a box of tissues from the pantry and pulling out a chair beside her.
She shook her head. I passed her the tissues. She pulled out two.
“What’s going on? You’re not pregnant too, are you? Because I’ve never cried more in my life.” I grinned weakly and she chuckled drunkenly. We were quite a pair of emotional messes.
“Yeah, pregnancy hormones are a bitch.” She blew her nose and glanced over at me, her eyes rimmed in drippy mascara. “But no, I’m not pregnant. I’m just having a hard day. Nix that—a hard week.”
“Is this about your mom’s visit with the cops last night?” I knew the feeling well, wondering if my mom was okay. My entire childhood was spent worrying about my mother.
“Yes, partly that, and this.” She turned her gaze to something in her hand. A pen. She examined it, then set it down. “The stupid pen.”
“Please tell me you’re not crying because you ran out of ink.”
“It’s not that. I’m just . . . dealing with a lot of memories lately. And this pen brought them all up . . . again.”
I picked up the pen, flipping it over so I could read the print.
“The Durham Hotel. Was that a special place for you and Ben?”
She sniggered, a harsh, bitter sound. “No, it wasn’t a special place for me, but it was for Ben.”
“What do you mean?”
She didn’t speak, not at first. Then the sounds formed words and the words formed sentences as the story poured from her lips. “It was at this hotel where I . . . I found . . . him . . . Where I found out for sure that Ben was cheating on me. I saw him there with another woman. It shook my world.”
“Oh no.” I rested my hand on her shoulder, almost afraid to touch her through her grief.
We sat in silence for a long time, so long I shifted to get up, figuring the conversation was over. She needed time alone. Then she spoke, her story forcing me back into my seat.
“It started with a strange credit card charge from this hotel. I didn’t even usually check the credit card statements, but that particular day I did. So I called, thinking it was a mistake. We hadn’t been to a hotel in ages, and never that one. When they told me that it was accurate—they even line listed the extra room charges for me—I thought maybe the credit card had been stolen. Never in a million years did I think my husband would cheat on me. Not after everything I’d been through, all we’d been through together. So I activated alerts on my credit card in case it was used again. Then one day I got a notification text that the card had been charged. Same hotel.”
Harper raised the pen to eye level, fixated on it.
“I needed to know for sure, so I went there. I had to see for myself. There I was, standing at the front desk asking the check-in lady what the person who used the card looked like, when she pointed him out. Across the room in the lounge stood my husband, arm in arm with another woman. A young blond home-wrecker with a tight body. How cliché is that? Well, I couldn’t face him, not like that, so I ran outside and down the sidewalk. I ran and ran and ran until I couldn’t breathe. I thought I was going to die that day. Part of me wishes I would have. That was the last time I saw my husband alive.”
“Oh my goodness, Harper. I’m so sorry. I can’t even imagine . . .” And yet I could.
“It’s unimaginable.” She lifted the wine bottle to her mouth and emptied the remnants in one long gulp. “To discover the man you love with all your heart has betrayed you in the worst possible way. It’s . . . worse than death. I thought I’d been through the worst after losing a child. Well, I was mistaken. That day I met parts of myself I never knew existed, and I could only feel darkness inside of me. Now I have no idea who I am anymore. I lost the best parts of me because he took them from me. I’ll never be able to trust someone ever again.” She paused. “Other than Lane, that is.”
“I understand.” And I truly did. “Betrayal changes you.” It was like falling into a pool. The initial shock is cold and unfamiliar, but as you get used to it, it starts to become part of you, soaking into you. “I feel terrible that you had to go through that.”
“If it would have ended with Ben’s death I might have been able to move on. But it didn’t. I ended up doing something terrible that I can’t fix, and now I don’t know what’s going to happen. The irony is that Ben’s cheating was nothing compared to what I’ve done.”
“What do you mean?”
She stopped. Realization sparked in her eyes. She hadn’t meant to share that, had she?
“Sorry, I don’t know what I’m saying. I really should have kept that to myself,” she hastily muttered.
What sin could a throw-pillow-loving, gluten-free homemaker possibly have committed that she couldn’t come back from? I wanted to Heimlich the details out of her, but her mouth was clamped shut. Conversation closed.
“Did you ever confront the woman he was cheating with?”
“No, I was too shaken up at the time, and honestly, if I ever did meet her again I’d probably kill her. So it’s for the best I never got the chance.” She pushed her chair out and stood, balling up the used tissues and grabbing the neck of the now empty wine bottle.
“I had no idea you had been through so much. And then, after all that, losing your husband . . .”
“I lost him a year ago, Candace. I had been trying to save a marriage that was already dead. When I found out he was at that hotel with another woman—when I really knew it—I couldn’t bear to see Ben or my kids or my mother or Lane. I was humiliated and broken. I spent the rest of that night crying in my car wondering why I had lost him. Wondering what I could have done to prevent him from cheating. You know what conclusion I came to? Nothing. I couldn’t have done a damn thing differently.”
“And that’s on him, not on you. You didn’t force him to cheat.”
“No, but I pushed him away. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I made his life a living hell, just as he did to me.” She shrugged, walking toward the kitchen. “In that way I suppose we were perfect for each other.”
I didn’t know what to say, how to console her.
She paused, her back toward me. “I’m sorry I’m so protective of Lane.” When she turned to face me, her cheeks were wet with tears.
“I understand that.”
“And I know it’s not right of me. I judged you wrongly from the moment I met you, and I’m sorry. I can’t seem to let my brother go, and I don’t know why.” The tears came fluidly now, and I rushed to her side.
“Hey, I get it, okay? You don’t need to apologize anymore. And you don’t need to cry over it.” Emotions made me uncomfortable. Maybe it was because my father never allowed me to have them.
“It’s just . . . I love him more than I love myself,” she sniffled, “and I’ll do whatever it takes to make him happy. But I’m sad over what that has turned me into.”
As Harper tossed the bottle in the recycling bin, I returned to the dining room to pick up the paper she had left on the table, not meaning to read it as I carried it to the kitchen. I paused in the doorway, my eyes glued to the letters and words in front of me. A last message from Ben to Harper:
My darling Harper,
You saw this coming, didn’t you? You knew one day you’d walk into our home and find me like this, taken by my own hand. You had to, after all the suffering. All the secrets. All the pain . . .
And I wondered why the police hadn’t seen this yet.