Page 77 of Letters From A Stalker

Find him.

I shut it down. For now. Julia is still talking, and whatever is happening inside me has no right to become something she has to manage.

“There was a doorway from the bedroom where I could see part of the living room,” she says, her gaze no longer focused on anything in my office. “There were toys on the floor. Kids’ things. I remember these little toy bicycles for some reason. I just stared at them because they gave me something to look at that wasn’t him.” Her fingers tighten together. “That’s when I realized he probably had a wife and children.”

My stomach turns.

“I remember thinking how stupid that was. Not what was happening to me. I was lying there thinking about whether his wife knew he brought women home.” Her laugh is small and completely devoid of humor. “That’s dissociation for you, I guess.”

“Yes,” I say quietly, but not too quiet for my voice to not sound my own. “It can be.”

She nods but still doesn’t look at me. “When he... when he entered me, he stopped for a second and said, ‘Fuck, you’re a virgin.’”

The pulse in my jaw continues to tick. I stop, trying to prevent it. Julia notices this time. Her eyes flick briefly toward my face before dropping again.

“He liked that,” she says. “I could tell.”

Every violent impulse I have spent my adult life learning to control arrives at once — my father’s face, Daniel Morris throwing bottles near his daughter, every man I grew up around who thought wanting something gave him the right to take it. And now an anonymous, featureless man with brown hair and brown eyes whose name Julia still hasn’t given me, smiling because he discovered the woman beneath him had never been penetrated before he forced himself inside her.

Ghost does not want to discuss diagnostic terminology. Ghost wants blood.

Fucking find him and end him.

I unclench my hand before my fingernails break skin against my palm.

“He finished quickly,” Julia continues. “Then he drove me home.”

That makes me look at her. “He drove you home afterward?”

“Yeah.” Her mouth pulls slightly at one corner, but again there is nothing resembling amusement behind it. “That part almost felt worse in some ways. He barely spoke to me. He just wanted me out of the car as fast as possible, like I had become inconvenient once he got what he wanted.”

For a moment, I cannot trust myself to speak. The silence stretches between us, but Julia doesn’t rush to fill it. Good, because I need several seconds to make sure the voice that comes out of me belongs to her psychiatrist rather than the man imagining what it would feel like to put his hands around her attacker’s throat.

“When you talk about this,” I say eventually, keeping my tone deliberately gentle, “you keep looking away from me.”

Her shoulders shift. “I know.”

“And you’ve explained several of his choices by describing what you did or didn’t do.”

That gets her attention.

“I’m not blaming myself.” The response is immediate and defensive.

I believe that she believes it. “Maybe not consciously.”

Her eyes narrow slightly.

I hold her gaze.

“You told me getting into his car didn’t seem stupid at the time. You emphasized that you weren’t screaming. You told me you didn’t fight him and explained why before I ever suggested those things mattered.”

Julia becomes very still. Not dissociated. Ashamed. The realization makes anger flash through me all over again, this time directed at everyone who helped put that shame there.

“Did you report him?”

“No.”

“Why not?” The question is not an accusation, and I make damn sure my voice cannot be mistaken for one.