Fake yours.

Chapter 6

She Stood very still. The path around her was empty she could see both ends of it, the amber glow of the main road in one direction and the darker mouth of the car park in the other. Nothing moved.

She had imagined it. The week had been too much, Adrian’s flowers and Noah’s controlled expression at the restaurant and the strangeness of all of it had accumulated into a background anxiety she was now projecting onto ordinary sounds.

She started walking again.

Her phone buzzed.

The screen lit up: Unknown Number.

She opened it.

A photograph. Taken from behind, from perhaps twenty feet away, showing her from the shoulders down her jacket, her bag, the yellow flower still tucked under her arm on the path she had been walking sixty seconds ago.

Below it, two lines of text.

You should stop hanging around Noah Kane.

This is your only warning.

She stood without moving. The phone felt heavier than it should have. Around her the campus was quiet and ordinary and entirely unhelpful, the lights on in distant buildings, a car moving somewhere beyond the car park wall. Whoever had taken this photograph had been twenty feet behind her. Had been watching her walk. Had waited until she was alone.

Was, possibly, still watching.

She did not run. She walked quickly, with the controlled movement of someone who understood that running announces fear to anyone watching back toward the lit street and the sound of other people, and did not look behind her once, because she did not want to know what she would see.

She didn’t sleep.

Not after the text. Not after lying in the dark running through every face she could place, every interaction that had turned strange, every person who might know enough about her and Noah to have an opinion about it. By three in the morning she had locked the door twice and checked the window. By five she had stopped pretending she was going to sleep and simply sat with the light on and her phone face-up on the desk, watching it as though it might explain itself.

Amara found her at seven and read the messages and said, with a flatness that cut through all the ways Zara had been trying to frame it as manageable: “Someone followed you home.”

“I don’t know that.”

“They took a photograph of you walking.”

“I know.”

“Zara.”

“I know.” She looked at her hands. “I know.”

The morning didn’t improve. She went to class because not going felt worse and afterward cut across the courtyard with her hood up and her eyes moving in the way they hadn’t moved before this week, checking sight lines, clocking faces, noting who was paying attention.

Noah appeared from a side path and fell into step beside her with his usual unhurried presumption, and she didn’t have the energy to deflect him.

“You look terrible,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“That wasn’t”

“I know.”

He was quiet for a moment, which was unusual enough that she glanced sideways. He was watching her with the particular quality of attention she’d noticed that first night.. not scanning, not social, but direct and specific, the look of someone trying to read something they weren’t being shown.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“You’re lying.”

“I’m tired.”

“You’re scared.” He said it without inflection, as a fact rather than a provocation. “You’ve been scared since I saw you this morning and you’ve been managing it, which is very you, but something happened.”

She stopped walking.

He stopped too. Around them students moved past on the path, indifferent, and the ordinary momentum of the campus continued without them while she stood in the middle of it deciding something.

She had spent a long time being self-sufficient in the way that starts as a choice and calcifies into instinct, until asking for help became something that required more effort than handling things alone. She recognized the pattern. She had written papers on versions of it.

She reached into her bag and took out her phone and handed it to him without a word.

He read the messages. Then looked at the photograph. The silence that followed had a different quality than his other silences, colder, with something moving through it that wasn’t quite anger yet but was on its way there.

He handed the phone back. “Where did you receive the note?”

“My bag. After my shift.”

“Someone touched your bag.”

“Yes.”

He said nothing for a moment. When he looked up his expression had settled into something that was very controlled the look of a person choosing how much of what they felt to let into their face.

“You’re not walking home alone,” he said.

“Noah”

“I’m not asking.”

“I can”

“I know you can.” His voice was level. “I know that. I’m not saying you can’t. I’m saying you don’t have to.” He held her gaze. “There’s a difference.”

The wind moved through the trees along the path, and somewhere above them a cloud shifted and the light changed, and Zara stood in the altered afternoon and felt something loosen in her chest not dramatically, just slightly, the way a door eases open when the pressure on both sides finally equalizes.

She nodded, once.

He nodded back.

They stood for a moment in the particular quiet of two people who have agreed on something without naming what it cost them. Then they started walking again, side by side, and neither of them said anything else, and the campus moved around them in its ordinary way, and across the road, in a car parked at the far edge of the lot, a figure sat very still.

Watching.

The figure’s hands tightened on the steering wheel as Noah’s shoulder moved close to Zara’s. As she didn’t step away. As the distance between them, which had been measured and maintained and observable for the better part of a week, finally closed.

A phone screen brightened in the shadow of the car’s interior.

Four words typed, then sent.

Zara’s phone buzzed in her pocket.

She felt it, looked down, and the moment she read the message the cold came back sharper this time, more specific, because this wasn’t about her anymore.

Now you’ve made him a target too.