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Emma turns toward me. “You think he knew my routine.”

“I think he knew enough of it to arrive at the right place at the right time and have photographers ready before you walked outside.”

Her gaze returns to the screen, and I see the next thought reach her before she says it.

“You think he’s been watching me.”

“I think that’s one possibility.”

She faces me fully. “What are the others?”

“He could’ve followed you himself, had somebody else do it, or spent enough time around the building to learn when you usually come and go. I don’t know which explanation is right yet.”

The frustration in her expression changes as she takes that in. “Have you found him on any other footage?”

“Security is checking the last month.”

“And if he isn’t there?”

“Then we’ll check what cameras we can access around the block and look for repeated vehicles or anybody spending enough time near the building to establish a pattern.”

Emma rubs her thumb along the side of her hand, her attention moving back to Spencer on the monitor. “You really think he might’ve been following me.”

“I think assuming he hasn’t would be a mistake until I’ve got a reason to believe otherwise.”

She stays quiet long enough for the footage to continue behind us. Spencer checks his watch once more, and less than a minute after Emma appears through the revolving doors, he moves toward her as though the entire encounter has arrived on schedule.

I stop the recording.

Emma looks from the frozen image to me. “So every change I’ve noticed today comes from this.”

“It does.”

“And you believe he’ll try again.”

“I believe you’ve shut down every way he’s tried to reach you, and yesterday he found another one.”

Emma blocked Spencer’s number, but that only made him contact her from another one. When she refused to engage with his messages or the flowers he sent afterward, he moved the next attempt to her workplace and brought cameras with him, creating a situation she couldn’t simply ignore without giving him another version of the story to sell.

Emma knows the sequence as well as I do. “I understand why you’re worried,” she says, moving around the table until she stands across from me. “I still don’t like what you’ve done with that worry.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

Her question keeps me from answering too quickly.

She presses her fingertips against the edge of the table. “If this had happened to anyone else here, you would’ve reviewed the footage, increased security around the building, and checked whether the person had been watching them. That’s your job.”

“It is.”

“You also would’ve talked to them before deciding how they were allowed to move through their own day.”

The answer comes before I can defend the decision, because I’d never handle another protection issue by cutting the person involved out of choices that directly affected them. I’ve spent most of my career believing every threat becomes manageable once I understand how it works.

Find the vulnerability, close it, and make sure the person you’re protecting never gets close enough to learn what almost happened.

Emma isn’t one of my clients, and the comparison she made earlier is still sitting between us.