Loving A Moretti - THE OBSESSION

Chapter THREE

The police came back a little after midnight.

By then, Jennie had turned off the television, abandoned our cereal bowls in the sink, and checked her front door enough times that I stopped counting. The third account was still sitting untouched in my follow requests, exactly where the officer on the phone had told me to leave it.

The officer who arrived wasn’t one of the two who had been at my apartment earlier. He looked tired in the specific way people did when they’d been working longer than they wanted anyone to know, and he listened while I went through everything again: the first photograph, the calls, the envelope under my door, the man caught on my building’s camera, and now the picture of Jennie and me at the diner.

He asked Jennie how long we had been there and whether either of us had noticed anyone outside. She shook her head. “No. We were too busy arguing about whether she should stay at my place.”

“We weren’t arguing.”

“You refused three times.”

“That’s not an argument. That’s you not accepting an answer.”

The officer’s pen paused over his notebook before he wisely continued without commenting.

He photographed the account username, profile picture, and bio from my phone. I told him I had already blocked the first two blank accounts, and he said that was fine, but I should leave this one alone. No accepting the request, no messages, no attempts to bait whoever was behind it into responding. If another account appeared, I was supposed to screenshot everything before blocking or reporting it.

None of the instructions sounded difficult. Save everything. Don’t respond. Don’t post my location in real time. Tell someone where I was going. Change my routine when possible.

It was the kind of advice that made sense until I thought about how much of my day was apparently supposed to change because somebody else had decided to insert himself into it.

Before leaving, the officer asked whether Jennie’s building had security cameras. She gave him a look and said, “We barely have a working buzzer.”

I almost laughed.

Almost.

After the door closed, Jennie locked it and checked the deadbolt with both hands. “You’re not posting anything for a while.”

“I barely post anything.”

“You posted the restaurant three days ago, and someone knew where you were.”

“We don’t know if that’s how they found me.”

“No, but until Creepy i********: Man sends us a detailed explanation of his methods, I’m working with what we have.”

I dropped onto the couch. “That name is terrible.”

“Creepy Photograph Man?”

“Somehow worse.”

She sat beside me and tucked one leg underneath herself. The diner photograph was still on my screen, but I locked the phone before I could start examining the background again. There was nothing there I hadn’t already seen.

“Tomorrow I’m going back to my apartment,” I said.

Jennie stared at me long enough that I knew the argument was loading. I cut her off before she could begin. “During the day. You can come with me. I need more than one shirt, and I’m not moving into your apartment because some asshole owns a camera.”

Her mouth closed.

“That was disturbingly reasonable,” she said.

“I have my moments.”

“I still think you should stay here.”

“And I still think your couch was designed by someone with a personal grudge against spines. We’ll discuss it tomorrow.”

She accepted that with visible reluctance, which was good enough for me.

I slept on the couch anyway and discovered by three in the morning that I had been right about it.

Every time I started drifting off, something pulled me back. Pipes shifted inside the wall. A car door slammed below. Someone laughed on the sidewalk and kept laughing for half a block. At some point, footsteps passed Jennie’s apartment in the hallway, and I stayed still until I heard another door open and close farther down.

I wasn’t afraid of every sound. That would have been easier to admit.

I was listening to all of them.

By nine, I gave up and went to the kitchen for water. Jennie was still asleep, one arm hanging off the edge of her bed when I passed her doorway. My phone had no new requests, messages, or calls. I checked twice anyway, then opened the screenshot from my building’s security camera.

It hadn’t become any more useful overnight. The man was still a collection of dark pixels in a black coat, his face turned just enough to keep me from getting a proper look. I enlarged the image until his features dissolved, reduced it, and tried again as if my phone might reward persistence with extra resolution.

It didn’t.

What bothered me was that I couldn’t separate the image completely from the man at the bookstore.

I remembered that face better than the security camera did: dark hair, strong brows, a mouth that had gone strangely still when I caught him looking at me. He had seemed serious for all of two seconds before I noticed the upside-down book in his hands.

I’d thought he was funny.

And attractive, apparently, if Jennie’s interpretation of not ugly was going to be entered into evidence.

The man in the lobby could have been him. He could also have been one of a few thousand dark-haired men in New York who owned black coats. I had never spoken to bookstore guy. I didn’t know his name. I wasn’t even sure the person I’d seen outside the restaurant had been him.

Still, every time I looked at the blurred frame, my brain tried to fill in the missing face with his.

I locked my phone and left it on the counter. Whoever had been following me had already managed to change the way I walked home, the way I looked through windows, and where I slept. I wasn’t letting him turn every stranger I remembered into a suspect too.

Jennie woke up forty minutes later and accused me of pouring water too loudly.

We found breakfast two blocks away at a bagel shop with six tables and a handwritten sign threatening a fifty-cent charge for extra cream cheese. I took the seat facing the window without thinking about it. Halfway through eating, I realized I had been watching the sidewalk more than Jennie.

“You’re checking again,” she said.

“I’m looking outside.”

“You hate people-watching before noon.”

“That’s weirdly specific.”

“I know you.” She took a drink of coffee, then added, “I’m not telling you to stop. I’m just saying I noticed.”

That was worse than being teased about it, so I concentrated on the burnt edge of my bagel until she changed the subject.

On the walk back, a man in a black coat passed us at the corner. My attention followed automatically until I saw gray hair at his temple. Another appeared outside a pharmacy two blocks later, younger but much taller than the man I remembered. By the third, I was annoyed enough to wonder whether the entire city had coordinated its wardrobe specifically to irritate me.

At Jennie’s building, she unlocked the door and said, “Three black coats.”

“I wasn’t counting.”

“I was. And before you tell me to get a hobby, this is currently my hobby.”

“Keeping track of men’s outerwear?”

“Keeping you from doing something stupid while pretending you’re not nervous.”

I followed her inside. “That sounds exhausting.”

“It is. You’re welcome.”

***

We returned to my apartment shortly after one.

Mr. Alvarez was arguing with someone beside the mailboxes about a leaking sink when we entered. He stopped long enough to tell me nobody unfamiliar had appeared on the lobby footage since I left, then promised he’d keep an eye on it. I thanked him and took the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator.

My apartment looked exactly as I had left it.

I stood in the doorway longer than necessary while Jennie squeezed past me. The pharmacy bag was still on the kitchen counter. My coat was over the chair. A mug I’d forgotten to wash sat beside the sink with a pale coffee ring drying inside it. Nothing about the room suggested someone had been there.

Jennie headed toward my bedroom, and I caught her before she started conducting her own investigation. “Please don’t touch everything.”

“I was going to check if anything looked different.”

“You don’t know what anything looked like before.”

“I know you well enough to recognize a crime scene.”

“My apartment is not that messy.”

She glanced at the sweater on my bedroom floor. “Sure.”

“It fell there last week.”

“And has been waiting patiently for rescue ever since?”

I picked it up and threw it onto the bed. “Investigation complete.”

Packing took less than ten minutes. I added jeans, another sweater, toiletries I’d forgotten the night before, and enough underwear to prevent Jennie from conducting another inventory. She was checking the kitchen cabinets for snacks she wanted to steal when I decided I needed air.

Not outside. Just something that didn’t feel like hiding.

I walked to the living room window and moved the curtain aside.

The laundromat across the street looked painfully ordinary in daylight. A woman was folding sheets near the front window. Someone had parked a bicycle against a pole outside. Above it, the apartments were a mess of fire escapes, air conditioners, curtains, and windows reflecting the gray sky.

Nothing moved because I was looking.

I stayed there another few seconds before letting the curtain fall.

My phone buzzed on the coffee table.

Jennie appeared from the kitchen with a packet of crackers she definitely hadn’t asked permission to take. “Please tell me that’s your mother.”

It was an unknown number.

Not No Caller ID this time. An actual number I didn’t recognize.

A message waited beneath it.

You changed your route.

For a second, I only stared.

Yesterday I had taken the longer way home after leaving Jennie. This morning I had left her apartment for breakfast two blocks away. Neither seemed important until someone else mentioned it.

Jennie read over my shoulder. The crackers stopped halfway to her mouth.

Another message arrived.

I still found you.

The apartment suddenly seemed too quiet.

Jennie reached for her phone. “I’m calling the officer.”

I nodded, but my attention stayed on the messages. There was no photograph this time. No proof of where he had been standing, no reflection to inspect, no background to enlarge until it broke into pixels. Just two sentences that told me he had noticed the one thing the police had specifically advised me to change.

My routine.

I went back to the window but didn’t touch the curtain. Through the narrow gap, I could see a slice of the street below. People moved past carrying groceries, coffee, shopping bags. A cab stopped at the light. Someone dragged a dog away from a paper cup it was trying to eat.

Any one of them could have passed me yesterday.

Any one of them could have watched.

Jennie was already explaining the messages on the phone when a third one appeared.

Don’t make it difficult.

My thumb hovered over the screen.

The irritation came before the fear this time, hot and immediate. I had changed one route. Slept one night somewhere else. Closed a few curtains. Somehow he had taken that as disobedience.

I took screenshots before doing anything else, exactly as the officer had instructed.

Then I looked at Jennie. “I’m not staying here.”

She covered the bottom of her phone. “Obviously.”

“No. I mean I’m not staying at yours either.”

Her expression changed. “Belle, this is not the time to prove a point.”

“I’m not proving anything. He found me at the diner. He knows I changed my route. If I keep going between the same two apartments, I’m giving him two places to wait.”

That stopped her.

For the first time since this started, Jennie didn’t immediately have an answer.

I picked up my bag from the couch and zipped it closed. I didn’t know where I was going yet. A hotel, maybe. Somewhere I could book without posting about it, somewhere without my name taped to a mailbox or a routine he had already memorized.

My phone buzzed once more.

Jennie and I both looked down.

The fourth message was shorter than the others.

There you are.

I didn’t go to the window.