Page 113 of Stalkers Anonymous

I tell them about meeting her and how instantly I was drawn to her. About how she’s a doctor, and about Lars Winters, and how the night he keyed her car I told myself I was just running a plate. Just once. Just to know who I was dealing with.

I tell them what just once turned into.

The license plate. The security footage. The background check. The address. The geofence.

When I get to the geofence, Jessica’s eyebrows go up.

“A geofence,” she says carefully. “On his phone.”

“Yeah.”

“So you were getting alerts when he was in particular places.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s how you knew he was near her the night she caught you.”

“Correct.”

She exhales slowly and sits back, but she doesn’t say anything else. Tyler is watching the floor with his hands folded in his lap.

“How did she react when she figured it out?” Jessica finally asks.

“She told me she needed space.” My voice breaks on “space.” I clear my throat before I continue, “She asked me to give it to her, and I am.”

“That’s good,” Tracey says. “That’s really good, Cole.”

“It doesn’t feel good.”

“It isn’t supposed to.”

The group absorbs each word like I’m their favorite true crime podcast and I just dropped a new episode. I can see recognition in their faces—the understanding that this could be any of them.

“She was right to be angry,” I continue. “I convinced myself I was doing it for her. But I was doing it for me.”

“That’s the thing none of us wants to face,” Austen adds, adjusting his glasses nervously. “The impact of our behavior on the people we’re watching. We focus so much on our own feelings, our own justifications, that we forget we’re making someone else feel hunted or uncomfortable.”

“I hope she doesn’t feel hunted by me.” The words are out before I can stop them, broken by the barely controlled emotion in my voice. “God, I hope she doesn’t.”

Grant looks up from his coffee cup. It’s the first time he’s really looked at me all night. I can’t read his expression.

Tracey doesn’t comment. She just writes something down on her clipboard.

“What about everything else?” she asks eventually. “The tracking. The geofence. The file on Lars Winters. The surveillance on Shitbag Steve…”

“I’ll delete it.”

“All of it?” Tracey raises an eyebrow when she looks up from her clipboard.

“All of it,” I confirm. “Tonight.”

“Okay.” Tracey flips to a fresh page. “Then here’s what happens now if you want to fully commit to recovery. Daily check-ins with Tyler, not weekly. You will attend every group meeting for the next six months. No exceptions. You and I will also meet one-on-one weekly, and we’ll work on some coping strategies for your obsessive thoughts. And I’d like you to begin a comprehensive inventory of all the times you’ve crossed this line in your life. Not just with Hailey. All of them.”

“A comprehensive inventory?”

“Every instance you can remember. Patterns, triggers, justifications. We can’t interrupt the behavior if we haven’t mapped it.”

The thought of writing down every creepy thing I’ve ever done makes me want to crawl out of my skin. But I know she’s right. I’ve been telling myself Hailey was different, that what I felt for her made what I did somehow more acceptable. The truth is this has been building for years.