Page 33 of Stalkers Anonymous

“There’s a patient who comes in regularly,” I admit. I continue carefully, unwilling to compromise patient confidentiality, even for someone as god-awful as Lars Winters. “An addict looking for drugs who gets aggressive with staff. They’re… I don’t know. Something about them feels off. They mentioned my pet ferret’s name, even though I’ve never told them about Chewy.”

“How would they know that?” he says, carefully adopting the same pronoun I used.

“That’s what I can’t figure out. I’m always so careful.” I shake my head, then buy myself a little time by slowly chewing a fat, green olive. The tangy brine and sharp burst of salt on my tongue help ground me here, at this table, and not at the side of my car seeing the note for the first time. I keep getting pulled back to that moment, try as I might to leave it in the past. “It’s probably nothing. They could have overheard me talking to a coworker, maybe?”

“Or they’ve been looking into you.” Cole’s voice carries an uneasy edge. “They could be following you. Watching your patterns.”

The bluntness of it makes my stomach drop, even though I’ve been thinking the same thing. It feels more real when someone else says it out loud.

“I don’t want to jump to conclusions,” I say quietly.

“Better to be overprepared than underprepared.” He must see something in my expression, because he softens and relaxes his shoulders, picking up my hand in his. “Sorry. I don’t mean to scare you. I just… I don’t like the idea of someone threatening you.”

The protectiveness in his tone sends a warm flutter through my stomach.

“I appreciate that.” I meet his eyes and squeeze his hand right back. “And I appreciate you taking the time to help me figure this out. I’ve been feeling pretty alone with it.”

“You’re not alone,” he says simply. “And for what it’s worth, I think at minimum you should get the mid-range system. The camera on your door, the smart locks. It’ll give you real-time alerts if something happens. A buddy owes me a favor, so I can get most of the equipment for free.”

“Cole, you don’t ha—”

Our waiter arrives with our entrees before I can argue, and the conversation shifts to lighter topics. I tell him some of my more ridiculous ER stories, like the one about the guy who superglued his fingers together on a dare, or the woman who came in with a potato stuck somewhere it definitely shouldn’t have been. He laughs in all the right places, his whole face lighting up with genuine amusement.

“What about you?” I ask, cutting my ravioli with the side of my fork. “What are your most interesting work stories?”

“Nothing as entertaining as a potato foreign body,” he says with a grin. “But I once accidentally caught someone conducting an affair using company property.”

I cringe. “An affair? What happened?”

“Yeah,” he sighs. “He was using the company’s phones and computers instead of their own. That’s how he hid it from his wife.”

“Did he get fired?”

“Yes. The security industry takes infidelity more seriously than just about any other occupation.” He takes a bite of his pasta. “If you’re willing to betray the person you live with, the person you’re supposedly closest to, then why would you be faithful to your company? Too much of a liability. But most of what I do is pretty mundane. I find vulnerabilities, patch them, set up new security protocols. When work gets exciting, it usually means something’s gone very wrong.”

“Sounds a bit like emergency medicine. Boring days are good days.”

“Exactly.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I notice movement at a table near the front of the restaurant. A man in his mid-thirties with slick black hair pushes out of his chair and lowers himself onto one knee.

“Oh shit,” I murmur, flicking my eyes from the man to Cole and back again.

Cole follows my gaze, his fork pausing midair.

The whole restaurant catches on at once, conversations immediately dimming. A violinist appears from nowhere—where the fuck did he come from?—and starts up a one-man version of Pachelbel’s Canon, minus the canon.

The woman at the table has gone very still. Her hands are flat on the white tablecloth, her face impossible to read.

I lean toward Cole, whispering quietly. “He’s wearing a Bluetooth earpiece.”

“I see it.”

“During his proposal.”

Cole gives me a patient glance, meeting my eyes before repeating, “I see it.”

The man keeps going. He’s loud and performative. He wants the entire restaurant to watch them. We listen to him go on and on about how his mother always said he’d find someone who could “tolerate his work schedule,” and then mentions, unprompted, his condo’s appreciation rate.