Loving A Moretti - THE OBSESSION

Chapter ELEVEN

I lasted until the following afternoon before telling Jennie about the bakery.

Technically, I didn’t tell her. I made the mistake of mentioning that Larkin hated raisins while we were on the phone, and there was a silence long enough for me to realize what I had done.

“Why do you know that?”

I stood in front of my bathroom mirror with mascara in one hand. “Know what?”

“That he hates raisins.”

“People have opinions about food, Jennie.”

“I know Dean hates olives. I know you hate when people put too much mayonnaise on sandwiches. These are things I know because I have eaten with you.” Another pause. “Did you eat with Larkin?”

I put the mascara down. “You’re exhausting.”

“You went on a date.”

“It wasn’t a date. I invited him into a bakery because I didn’t feel like going home yet.”

Jennie made a sound that was somehow more offensive than laughter. I could picture her face without seeing it. “So you voluntarily extended your time together, sat at a table, ordered drinks and learned personal information about each other.”

“When you describe it like that, anything sounds like a date.”

“That’s because I described a date.”

I gave up on defending myself and finished getting ready while she celebrated a victory nobody had awarded her. Eventually she asked the question I had known was coming: whether anything happened. I told her no. We talked, Larkin lost another argument with furniture, and then I went home. She seemed disappointed until I reminded her that less than twenty-four hours earlier she had been entertaining the possibility that he was my stalker.

“I still am,” she said. “I can be suspicious and nosy at the same time.”

“At least you’re consistent.”

That was the part I couldn’t quite manage myself.

I was suspicious when Larkin wasn’t around. Alone in my apartment, I could arrange everything I knew into a list that made him look terrible. The repeated appearances. The man in the lobby footage. The black coat. The fact that nobody could confirm where he had been last Tuesday. Jennie’s scheduled-message theory had been particularly difficult to remove from my head.

Then Larkin appeared and became a person again.

He made dry jokes. He got embarrassed. He remembered things I said without using them to prove how attentive he was. He asked before carrying a grocery bag even after I had let him do it twice. He could have spent an hour at the bakery asking questions about where I lived and where I went every day, and instead we argued about raisins.

Maybe that was why I wanted to see him again.

Or maybe I was an i***t.

Both remained possible.

I had plans with Dean that evening, and for once they had nothing to do with keeping me safe. He needed a second opinion on a jacket he wanted for an upcoming event because, according to him, Jennie had lost voting privileges after suggesting something “with personality.” I told him that usually meant she hated whatever he had chosen. He told me that was why I was his favorite until I reminded him there were only three of us.

We met outside a clothing store just after six. Dean rejected the first two jackets I liked, I rejected one that made him look like somebody’s divorced uncle at a rooftop bar, and by seven we had accomplished nothing except irritating each other.

My phone stayed quiet the entire time.

I noticed.

That was becoming its own problem. Every hour without a message should have made me relax, but silence had started feeling less like absence and more like waiting. I checked my notifications while Dean disappeared into another fitting room, then caught myself opening the blocked-number list for no reason.

“You’re doing it again,” Dean said when he came out.

I locked my phone. “Doing what?”

“Looking at that thing like it owes you money.”

He stood in front of the mirror and pulled at the sleeve of a dark jacket. I told him it was better than the last one, which apparently wasn’t enough enthusiasm because he turned to inspect my face instead.

“Anything new with him?”

I knew which him he meant this time. “No messages since yesterday.”

Dean nodded and returned to the mirror. Unlike Jennie, he didn’t immediately turn the silence into a theory. “Good.”

I watched him adjust the collar. “I saw Larkin again.”

His hands stopped.

“Why does everyone do that?”

His eyebrows furrowed slightly as he turned to me. “Do what?”

“Freeze every time I say his name.”

Dean let out an amused sigh. “Because lately, every time you mention his name, it’s followed by something you should’ve told us earlier.”

“That is extremely dramatic.”

“Bakery?”

I stared at him. “Jennie already told you?”

“She texted me twelve minutes ago.”

“Traitor.”

“She included three cake emojis and the word date in capital letters.”

I pulled out my phone. “I’m blocking her.”

Dean laughed and disappeared back into the fitting room.

We left twenty minutes later with a jacket neither of us completely hated. Outside, the sidewalks were crowded with people heading home, and Dean suggested food before we split up. We ended up at a small noodle place where the tables were sticky no matter how many times someone wiped them down.

He waited until our food arrived before asking about Larkin properly.

I told him almost everything. The bakery. The conversation. The fact that Larkin still hadn’t given me a reason to decide whether the coincidences meant anything. I left out how much I had enjoyed sitting across from him because Dean didn’t need that information.

Unfortunately, he knew me.

“You like him.”

I nearly inhaled a noodle. “I barely know him.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

“You didn’t ask a question.”

“Exactly.”

I pointed my chopsticks at him. “Spend less time with Jennie.”

He smiled and went back to eating, mercifully leaving it alone.

We separated shortly after nine. Dean offered to walk me home, and I refused because I was taking the subway in the opposite direction from him and because I had reached my daily limit for being escorted places. He made me promise to text when I got inside.

My building looked exactly as I had left it.

Mr. Alvarez wasn’t at the desk, but a delivery driver stood in the lobby arguing quietly with someone on the phone. I checked the mail, took the elevator upstairs and let myself into my apartment.

Nothing looked wrong.

I locked the door behind me, dropped my bag on the small table near the entrance and kicked off my shoes. The curtains were still closed from that morning. The kitchen light I had forgotten to turn off was still burning over the sink.

I texted Dean.

ME: home

His reply came before I reached the bedroom.

DEAN: miraculous

DEAN: lock the door

ME: blocked

I smiled, plugged my phone in and changed into an old shirt. It wasn’t until I went into the bathroom to wash my face that I noticed the cabinet above the sink was slightly open.

I stopped.

It was barely an inch.

For several seconds I stared at it, trying to remember whether I had left it that way. I had been rushing while talking to Jennie that afternoon. Mascara on the counter. Hairbrush beside the sink. I could easily have opened the cabinet for something and failed to close it properly.

I pushed it shut.

Then I opened it again.

Everything looked normal. Toothpaste. Skincare. Painkillers. A nearly empty box of bandages shoved toward the back. I moved each item with my fingertip, embarrassed by what I was doing even though nobody was there to see it.

Nothing was missing.

I closed the cabinet and washed my face.

The feeling followed me into the bedroom.

My closet was untouched. The drawers looked normal. Nothing had been moved on the nightstand. I checked the window lock, then hated myself for checking it because I lived several floors above the street and nobody was climbing the building to rearrange my moisturizer.

I went back to the kitchen for water.

That was when I saw the book.

It sat on the far end of my kitchen counter beneath a stack of unopened mail.

I had bought it two weeks ago and left it on the coffee table. I knew that because I had been using the receipt as a bookmark, and I remembered dropping the book there after reading on the couch three nights earlier.

Now it was in the kitchen.

I didn’t touch it.

My apartment suddenly felt too quiet.

I looked at the front door. Deadbolt locked. Chain in place. Nothing damaged around the frame.

Maybe I had moved the book.

That was the reasonable explanation.

I had carried groceries in and out. Packed things when I stayed at Dean’s. Come home distracted more times than I could count. There were dozens of reasons a book could travel fifteen feet without becoming evidence of a crime.

I crossed the room and lifted it carefully.The receipt was still inside. A cold pressure settled beneath my ribs anyway.

I opened to the marked page.

Nothing.

I flipped through the next few pages, then the rest of the book. No note. No photograph. Nothing tucked between them.

I laughed once under my breath, mostly because the alternative was standing there frightened of my own paperback.

“You’re losing it,” I muttered.

I put the book back on the coffee table.

Then I noticed the coaster. There were four on the table, stacked neatly beside the remote.

I never stacked them.

One usually lived beneath the water glass beside my bed. Another had been on the kitchen counter that morning. The other two floated around the apartment depending on where I abandoned a drink.

All four were here.

Perfectly aligned.

I stopped breathing for a second. My phone was charging in the bedroom. I walked toward it without running, although every muscle in my body wanted to. Halfway there, I glanced at the dark television screen and saw the apartment reflected behind me.

Empty.

I grabbed my phone and called Mr. Alvarez first. Then the police. Only after both calls did I text Jennie and Dean.

I stayed near the front door while I waited, shoes back on, keys in my hand. Nothing else moved. Nobody appeared. The apartment remained exactly as it had been when I walked in, except now every object seemed capable of being wrong.

My eyes kept returning to the coffee table.

The book and the four coasters.

I couldn’t remember moving either of them.