THE MAN WHO WAS SENT TO KILL ME

Chapter 4 — He Keeps Appearing

Trisha was standing outside my building with a bottle of red wine tucked under one arm and her coat buttoned up wrong, which was very Trisha. She was the kind of person who moved through life at full speed and did not always stop to check if her buttons matched their holes.

She took one look at my face and said, "Right. We are not doing this in the cold."

We went up to my apartment. She found two glasses while I locked the door behind us, which I did not usually bother with this early in the evening. Trisha noticed. She did not say anything yet but I saw her clock it.

We sat on my couch. She poured. I drank more than I normally would in one first sip and she watched me do it with those sharp brown eyes that missed absolutely nothing.

"Start talking," she said.

So I did.

I told her about the audit. About the Dusk Holdings transfer. About Gerald being assigned to the bottom of his staircase. About the footsteps in the office. About the man on the black motorcycle who had been outside my building, outside Patty's diner, who somehow had my phone number and access to my phone and who had called me that afternoon from a number I did not have to tell me that I was both safe and not safe at the same time.

Trisha listened to all of it without interrupting, which told me she was taking it seriously. Trisha interrupted everything when she was not worried. Silence from Trisha meant she was actually thinking.

When I finished she was quiet for a moment.

Then she said, "Show me this man."

"I do not have a photo of him."

"You have been seeing him for two days and you did not take a photo?"

"I was a little distracted by the fear, Trisha."

She gave me a look. "Describe him."

So I did that too. The black motorcycle. The leather jacket. The dark hair that was a little long. The jaw. The scar along the left side of it. The way he held himself like someone who had never been surprised in his life and did not intend to start.

Something moved across Trisha's face while I was describing him. Not quite recognition. More like a category clicking into place.

"Sol," she said slowly. "That sounds like someone who has had training."

"What kind of training?"

"The kind the military gives you. Or someone like the military." She paused. "The way you describe him sitting on that bike. Watching without moving. Not hiding but not announcing himself either. That is not a regular person doing that. Regular people fidget. Regular people look away when you look back at them." She picked up her wine glass. "This person sounds like someone who was taught how to watch."

I stared at her. "How do you know that?"

"My brother did two tours. I know what it looks like when someone has learned to be still on purpose." She looked at me carefully. "Which means whoever sent him knows what they are doing. This is not some low level threat, Sol. This is organized."

The word organized sat in the room between us and took up a lot of space.

"What do I do?" I said.

"You go to the police."

"With what? A financial document I took from a client audit without authorization and a man who has technically not done anything to me?"

She opened her mouth. Closed it again.

"Exactly," I said.

She refilled both our glasses. "Okay. Then you do not go to the police yet. But you do not go anywhere alone either. And you tell me everything as it happens. Every single thing."

"Trisha."

"I mean it, Solène. You are not doing this by yourself."

I looked at her. This woman who had been my friend for eleven years. Who had shown up outside my building on a cold evening with wine and her coat buttoned wrong because I had sounded off on the phone the night before and she had been quietly worried about me ever since.

"Okay," I said. "Everything as it happens."

She nodded. Satisfied.

We sat together for another hour and talked about other things, careful easy things, the way you do when you need to give your brain a rest from something heavy. She told me about a man she had been seeing who had recently revealed that he did not believe in washing his bedsheets more than once a month. She was very firm on the fact that this relationship was over.

By the time she left it was past nine and I felt slightly better. Not safe. But less alone.

I locked the door behind her. Both locks this time.

Then I went to the window.

He was there.

Parked just outside the entrance to my building. Same spot as the first night. Black motorcycle. Leather jacket. One boot on the ground. He was not looking up at my window this time. He was just there. Present. Like a full stop at the end of a sentence.

I stood at the window and looked at him for a long time.

Part of me wanted to call the police. But every time I picked up that thought and turned it over I came back to the same problem. He had not threatened me. He had not touched me. He had told me to delete a photo and go home and called me from an unknown number. None of that was nothing but none of it was enough either, not for a police report that anyone would take seriously.

And there was something else.

Something I did not want to admit to Trisha or to myself but that was sitting there quietly insisting on being noticed.

I did not feel afraid when I looked at him.

I felt watched. I felt uncertain. I felt a hundred things I could not name cleanly. But underneath all of it there was something that was almost the opposite of fear. Something that felt, against every piece of logic I owned, like the closest thing to safe I had felt since I found that document two nights ago.

That made no sense at all.

This man was following me. He had access to my phone. He knew things about me he should not know. He could be dangerous. He probably was dangerous. Trisha had just finished telling me he had the look of someone who had been trained to do things I did not want to think about too hard.

And yet.

I pressed my hand flat against the cold glass of the window.

He looked up.

Directly at my window. Like he had known I was standing there the whole time. Like he had been waiting for me to appear.

We looked at each other through the glass and the dark and the distance between us.

Then I dropped my hand and stepped back from the window and went to bed.

The next two days followed a pattern that should have frightened me more than it did.

Every morning I looked out my window and he was gone. Every evening when I came out of my office building or the grocery store or wherever the day had taken me, he was somewhere nearby. Not always visible immediately. But there. A black shape at the edge of things. A motorcycle parked one street over. The particular feeling on the back of my neck that I was starting to recognize as him the way you recognize a familiar smell.

On the Wednesday I went to the grocery store after work. I was standing in the cereal aisle trying to decide between two boxes that were essentially the same thing with different packaging when I felt it. That feeling. I looked up slowly.

He was at the end of the aisle.

Not pretending to shop. Not holding a basket. Just standing there with his hands in the pockets of his jacket watching me with that flat calm expression that I was starting to think might just be the only expression he had.

I looked at him. He looked at me.

I put one of the cereal boxes in my basket and walked toward him because I had decided somewhere between the first and second day of this that I was not the kind of woman who looked away and waited for things to happen to her.

He did not move as I walked toward him. Did not step back. Did not shift his weight. Just waited.

I stopped about two steps away from him. Close enough to speak quietly.

"You are in my grocery store," I said.

"Yes," he said.

"Are you going to tell me why?"

"No."

I studied his face up close for the first time. He was younger than I had initially thought. Mid thirties maybe. The scar on his jaw was exactly where I had thought it was, thin and straight like it had been made by something precise rather than something accidental. His eyes were very dark and very steady and there was nothing in them I could read. Nothing warm. Nothing cold exactly either. Just steady. Like looking at deep water.

"Are you going to keep following me?" I said.

He considered the question like it deserved actual thought. "Yes," he said.

"Why?"

Nothing.

"Are you going to hurt me?"

Something shifted in his eyes. Very small. There and gone. "No," he said.

It was the fastest answer he had given me. No hesitation at all.

I did not know why but I believed him.

I believed him and that made me angrier than anything else about this whole situation because I had no business believing a man I did not know who was following me around my own city and refusing to tell me a single thing about himself or why he was there.

"I want you to stop," I said.

He held my gaze. "I know."

"But you are not going to."

"No."

I stood there for another moment. Then I stepped around him and walked to the end of the aisle and did not look back.

My hands were not shaking this time.

That was either a good sign or a very bad one.

On the Thursday I saw him outside my gym in the morning.

On the Thursday evening I saw him parked two cars down from mine in the office parking lot.

On the Friday morning I stood at my kitchen window with my oatmeal and looked out at the street and he was there, earlier than usual, the motorcycle still and dark in the pale morning light.

I tapped on the glass.

He looked up.

I held up my coffee mug at him like a toast.

He stared at me for a long moment.

Then, so small I almost missed it, he dipped his chin. Just once. The same nod he had given me that first night outside Patty's diner.

I turned away from the window and finished my breakfast.

I was in serious trouble and I knew it.

Not because of the document. Not because of whoever had sent him. Not because of Gerald or the boot print in the server room or the name Dusk Holdings that existed nowhere I could find it.

I was in serious trouble because I was starting to look forward to seeing him.

And that was the most dangerous thing that had happened to me all week.