Sadie’s POV
Three days.
For three days, I didn't turn my phone back on. For three days, I went to work, taught my classes, graded my papers, and pretended that my life was a normal life being lived by a normal person in a normal town. For three days, I dropped Lily at Maplewood in the morning and picked her up in the afternoon and asked about her day and helped her with homework and read her a story at bedtime and ignored the steel latch on the fence that glinted in the moonlight like a watchful eye.
For three days, Taylor Blackwood respected my boundary.
I should have been relieved. I wasn't. The silence was worse than the contact. It was the silence of a predator waiting – not stalking, not chasing, just existing in the periphery of my awareness like a low hum I couldn't unhear.
Mar
