Page 144 of Letters From A Stalker

“Mandatory Sunday dinner at Mara’s.”

I stare at him. “Mandatory?”

“According to Mara.”

I giggle at that. “That tracks.”

“Connor, her son, usually chooses the movie, which means I’ve seen the same superhero film enough times to qualify as a supporting character.”

I laugh, picturing it despite myself, Kai in one of those immaculate suits trapped on a couch beside a seven-year-old watching Spider-Man for the twenty-third time.

“You go every Sunday?”

“Most.”

“And she feeds you?”

“Usually more than necessary.”

“Okay, that one I believe.” I slap a hand against my knee to emphasize the statement.

His eyebrow rises. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“Mara has the energy of someone who would physically put food in your mouth if you tried to tell her coffee was breakfast.”

A quiet laugh escapes him. “That is disturbingly accurate.”

The conversation only lasts a few minutes before he turns the focus back toward me, but something about it stays with me after the session ends. Not because he told me anything extraordinary — he goes to the gym, he rides motorcycles, he eats dinner with his friend and her kid every Sunday. These are all normal things. Maybe that is why I like knowing them. For the first time, Kai exists in my head somewhere other than this office. I picture him on a motorcycle with the city lights moving past, then immediately wonder what he wears because the idea of him taking the highway in a three-piece suit is absurd enough to make me smile while I’m waiting for the elevator.

I don’t know why that image follows me home. It simply does.

Another week passes. Ghost comes twice. The first time there is no letter, only the quiet sound of my front door opening sometime after eleven because I left it unlocked before going upstairs. I am already in bed reading when the mattress dips beside me, and the book survives approximately thirty seconds before his hand closes over the top edge and removes it from my grip.

The second time he doesn’t come inside at all. A black envelope waits on the porch when I return from work, containing nothing particularly filthy for once, just a few lines telling me he watched me dance around the kitchen while making dinner and that if I ever sang into a wooden spoon again, he was going to need an explanation for why I owned an actual microphone-shaped wine stopper but still preferred kitchen utensils. I spend an embarrassing amount of time staring at that sentence because it means he laughed. I know he did. I can hear it now, or at least imagine it, the same quiet sound he made when I told him to shut up while tracing the tattoo across his back. The memory makes me smile.

Then Thursday arrives again. I leave work earlier than expected because a meeting gets moved, and rather than go home for forty minutes only to turn around again, I drive directly to Kai’s office. Mara looks up when I walk into reception and immediately checks the clock.

“You’re early.”

“I can leave and make a dramatic entrance at exactly three if that helps.”

She waves one hand dismissively. “He’s not with anyone. Go in. He was catching up on paperwork when I checked ten minutes ago.”

I glance toward the closed office door. “Are you sure?”

“If he complains, tell him I overruled him.”

“That feels dangerous.”

“He fears me.”

“Come in.”

I step through and close the door behind me. Then stop, at the same time as the air gets knocked out of my lungs.

He is standing beside the small cabinet near the window, jacket draped over the back of his chair while he dries one hand with a paper towel. His tie is still on, though loosened slightly, and both sleeves of his dress shirt have been rolled past his forearms. My eyes catch on the ink before anything else. Black. Geometric. A sharp sequence of lines and triangles wraps around his left forearm, disappearing beneath the rolled white cotton near his elbow and extending almost all the way toward his wrist.

Everything inside me goes silent. Kai looks up, and surprise crosses his face when he sees me standing there, followed almost immediately by something sharper when his gaze traces mine down to his exposed forearm. It lasts no more than a second, the kind of reaction most people would probably miss entirely, but I have spent months sitting across from this man while he taught me to notice the things I do before I understand why I’m doing them.