CHAPTER SIX

NADIA’S POV

I stand there with the phone against my ear and I feel the floor tilt a little, like the whole apartment just shifted an inch to the left.

“What do you mean he doesn’t work for Ezra?” I say. My voice comes out too fast, too high. “Dara, what are you talking about?”

“His name is Victor Hale,” she says. “He used to work for Gerald Cole. Before Gerald died, Victor was the one who paid me. Handed me an envelope in a parking lot like it was nothing. And he never stopped calling me, Nadia. Even after the old man died. He calls me twice a year, just to check in. Just to ask how you’re doing. How is Miles doing?”

My hand goes cold around the phone.

“For two years?” I say. “You’re telling me some man has been asking about my son for two years, and you never once told me?”

“I thought I was protecting you,” she says, and her voice cracks right down the middle. “I thought if I kept talking to him, kept him calm, he’d leave you alone. I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t have anyone to ask.”

“You could have asked me.”

“You would have panicked. You would have packed a bag and disappeared again, and this time I wouldn’t have known where.”

She’s not wrong. That’s the worst part. Five years ago, I ran because I was scared, and some small, tired part of me knows that if she had told me about Victor Hale a year ago, I probably would have run again.

“Where is he now?” I ask. “Right now. Do you know?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “He doesn’t tell me things like that. He just checks in and hangs up. But Nadia — the last time he called, it wasn’t like the others. He asked different questions. He asked what school Miles was going to start in September. He’s never asked something like that before.”

The kitchen is very quiet. I can hear the refrigerator humming. I can hear my own heartbeat, which feels stupid, but I can.

“Nadia, are you there?” Dara says, and for the first time in this whole conversation she sounds less like a sister who made a mistake and more like a scared kid who watched something get out of control a long time ago. “Say something.”

“What does he look like?” I ask. “If I saw him, would I know?”

“Gray suit,” she says slowly, like she’s trying to remember something she’s spent a long time trying to forget. “Older. Fifties maybe. He always carries a folder, like he’s about to hand you papers. He’s polite. That’s the part that scared me the most. He’s never once raised his voice at me.”

Something about the word folder makes my stomach turn over, though I can’t say why yet.

“I have to go,” I say.

“Nadia, wait—”

“I have to go, Dara.”

I hung up before she could say anything else. I stand in the kitchen holding the phone with both hands like it might do something on its own if I let go of it. Somewhere down the hall, Miles is asleep with his dinosaur nightlight glowing green under his door, and I have never in my life wanted to go stand in a doorway and just watch him breathe as badly as I want to right now.

I haven’t moved yet. I make myself think.

A man named Victor Hale has been watching me for two years. Before Ezra ever found that HR file. Before any of this started. Which means none of this began the morning Ezra knocked on my door. It began a long time before that, quietly, in the background of my whole ordinary life, while I was pouring cereal and paying rent late and thinking the worst thing that could happen to me was losing this apartment.

I walked down the hall and opened Miles’s door an inch, just enough to see him. He’s on his back with one arm thrown over his head and his dinosaur blanket kicked halfway off the bed, the way he sleeps every single night, completely unaware that his whole world has a stranger’s name attached to it now. I watch him breathe for longer than I mean to. Then I pulled the door closed and went back to the kitchen, because standing there wasn’t going to protect him. Doing something might.

For a second, I thought about calling the police. What would I even say? A man might be watching my son and I don’t have an address or a license plate or a single fact that would make sense out loud. I'm thinking about calling a locksmith instead, right now, tonight, and then I remember it’s almost ten and nobody is coming out at this hour for a woman who sounds this shaken.

I picked up my phone to call Ezra. My thumb is already over his name when someone knocks on the door.

Not a text. Not a call. A knock, right there, three soft raps against the wood, at nine forty at night.

Every muscle in my body goes still.

I think, for one hopeful second, that it’s Ezra, that he forgot something, that he’s standing there with that same careful look on his face he had this morning. But Ezra just left. Ezra doesn’t knock like that — quiet, even, patient, like someone who has all the time in the world and no reason to hurry.

I look through the peephole.

There’s a man standing in the hallway I have never seen before in my life. Gray suit, no tie, a leather folder tucked under one arm like he’s here for a meeting instead of standing outside a stranger’s apartment at nine:forty at night. He isn’t looking at the door. He’s looking down the hall, toward Miles’s window, the one that faces the fire escape.

My whole body goes cold at once.

He knocks again. Softer this time. Almost polite.

“Ms. Reeves,” he says through the door, in a voice so calm it makes my skin crawl. “My name is Victor Hale. I think it’s time we talked.”