Chapter 5: The Watcher

Anastasia noticed the same man twice before she let herself admit she was noticing him at all. The first time was Tuesday, near the corner where Eighth Street bent toward the market square—a figure in a grey coat standing with the particular stillness of someone waiting for a bus that never seemed to come. The second time was Wednesday, closer, outside the little café where she bought her coffee some mornings when she was running early enough to justify the detour. Different coat. Same stillness. The kind of thing that would have meant nothing at all, except that her body seemed to know something her mind hadn’t caught up to yet—a low hum of unease settling into her shoulders each time, gone as soon as she looked directly at him, as though he dissolved the moment she tried to focus. By Thursday, she could no longer convince herself it was nothing.

“You’re quiet today,” Eleanor observed, watching her from across the worktable where they were assembling a wedding order, white and blush and green in careful, layered abundance.

“Quiet in the bad way. Not the humming-to-yourself way.”

“Just tired.”

“Mm.”

Eleanor did not look convinced, but she let it sit, the way she generally did, trusting Anastasia to say more when she was ready and not a moment before. They worked in companionable silence for a while, the radio playing something low and warm from the back room, and Anastasia let her hands find their rhythm and tried to let the rhythm carry her thoughts somewhere quieter. It didn’t entirely work. She kept glancing at the window. When she got home that evening, the apartment smelled like rosemary and garlic, and Isabella was at the stove with her sleeves pushed up, humming along to something on the little radio she kept on the counter, the same one she’d had for as long as Anastasia could remember, its dial worn smooth from twenty years of the same careful fingers turning it to the same station.

“You’re home early,” Isabella said, not turning.

“Eleanor let me go. Slow afternoon.”

Anastasia dropped her bag by the door and came to lean against the counter, watching Isabella’s hands move with the same unconscious competence Anastasia recognized in her own—stripping stems, chopping herbs, some skill so deeply grooved into muscle memory it required no thought at all.

“Isabella, can I ask you something strange?”

Isabella’s hands didn’t stop moving, but something in her shoulders went very slightly more careful.

“Of course.”

“Have you ever had the feeling someone was watching you? Not—not in a general way. Specifically. Like someone had picked you out of a crowd and decided to keep an eye on you.”

The knife stilled against the cutting board for exactly one beat too long before Isabella resumed chopping, her voice pitched carefully light.

“Everyone feels that way sometimes. Cities make people paranoid. All those strangers, all that noise—it’s natural to feel watched, even when you aren’t.”

“I don’t think it’s that.”

“Ana.”

Isabella set the knife down and finally turned, and her face wore an expression Anastasia recognized from childhood scraped knees and thunderstorms—careful, deliberate calm, the kind adults wore when they wanted a child to believe everything was fine before they’d fully convinced themselves of it.

“What happened?”

“Nothing happened. That’s the strange part.”

Anastasia wrapped her arms loosely around herself, trying to find words for a feeling that resisted words, that lived somewhere below language in the old animal part of her brain.

“There’s a man. I’ve seen him twice this week, in different places, and both times he was just—standing there. Watching, I think, though he never looked at me directly. And both times I felt like I already knew I should be afraid, before I understood why.”

Isabella was quiet for a long moment, her hands very still on the counter now, knuckles pale where she gripped the edge of it.

“What did he look like?”

“Grey coat. Ordinary, mostly. I couldn’t describe his face if you asked me to—that’s the strangest part, I’ve looked right at him and somehow I can’t hold onto the details.”

Anastasia studied Isabella’s face, the tightness gathering at the corners of her mouth.

“Isabella. You know something.”

“I don’t know anything.”

The words came too quickly, too smoothly—the practiced denial of someone who had used it many times before. Isabella turned back to the stove, stirring something that didn’t need stirring, her back a careful, deliberate wall.

“You’re imagining patterns where there aren’t any. It happens, in a city this size. You see the same handful of strangers again and again simply because you walk the same streets they do.”

“That’s not—”

“Ana.”

Isabella’s voice cracked, just slightly, on the single syllable of her name, and when she turned back around there was something in her eyes that made Anastasia’s chest go tight and cold. Fear. Not the vague, diffuse fear of an ordinary anxious evening, but something sharper, older, something that had clearly been waiting a long time for a door to open onto it.

“Please. Let it go. Whatever you think you saw, whoever that man was—please, just let it go. Some things are safer left alone.”

“Safer for who?”

Isabella didn’t answer. She turned back to the stove instead, and her hands, when Anastasia looked at them, were trembling very faintly, a tremor she was clearly working hard to hide. They ate dinner mostly in silence that night, the easy warmth of the kitchen gone brittle at the edges, replaced with something neither of them named. Anastasia watched Isabella from across the small table, watched the careful, deliberate way she held her fork, the way her eyes kept drifting toward the window as though checking, again and again, that the curtains were fully closed.

“I’m sorry,” Isabella said finally, long after the food had gone cold between them.

“I don’t mean to frighten you. I only—”

She stopped. Started again.

“There are things from before you can remember, Ana. Things I’ve never told you, because I never saw the use in it, because I hoped, foolishly maybe, that I could simply love you enough to keep the past exactly where it belonged. In the past. Behind us.”

Her eyes, when they finally met Anastasia’s, were bright with something that might have been tears, might have been simple exhaustion.

“I don’t know if that was the right choice. I’ve asked myself a thousand times whether it was the right choice, and I still don’t know.”

“Isabella, what are you talking about?”

“Nothing you need to worry about tonight.”

Isabella reached across the small table and took Anastasia’s hand, gripping it tightly, the way she used to grip it crossing busy streets when Anastasia was small enough to need the reassurance of it.

“I promise you, whatever this is, I won’t let anything happen to you. I’ve spent my whole life making sure of that. I’m not about to stop now.”

It should have been comforting. Anastasia wanted it to be comforting. Instead, lying awake much later, staring at the ceiling while the apartment settled into its familiar night sounds—the radiator ticking, a car passing somewhere below, Isabella’s soft, uneven breathing through the thin wall between their rooms, breathing that didn’t sound like sleep so much as someone working hard to imitate it—Anastasia found herself turning her mother’s pendant slowly between her fingers in the dark, tracing the worn silver rose with her thumb, and thinking that for the first time in her life, she did not fully believe her own home was as safe as it had always felt. Somewhere out there, a stranger in a grey coat had looked at her and seen something she couldn’t yet see in herself. She meant to find out what it was.