I recognized the meal on the first bites of heirloom baby carrots and pommes aligot as coming from one of my parents’ favorite fine dining restaurants. Just like they never cleaned, and never repaired anything that broke, they also never cooked a meal. My mom had a shelf of cookbooks in the kitchen, suggesting she’d known her way around the kitchen at one time, but that time had long passed before I entered high school.
Hearing Ahanti’s name snapped me back to the conversation. It’d been a man’s voice. I couldn’t imagine Mark telling my parents that Ahanti had “dumped” me as a friend.
It sounded like my dad was telling the story of how Ahanti helped save my life when Peter tried to kill me.
My dad shifted his gaze in my direction again, and it took everything I had not to shrink under the force of it. It was the look he normally reserved for the prosecution after he finished a line of questioning with a witness. The one that said Only a fool would contradict me.
“Her mother and I understand that, after an experience like that, almost anyone would need time away. We’ve only ever wanted what’s best for her, and we’re glad you’ll be moving back to DC so she can return to her career.”
It was a statement packed with messages. The one for me said, If you come back, all will be forgiven and we’ll never speak of this again. The one for Mark was the kind of pressure my dad was so good at exerting—a subtle implication that if we didn’t come back, he’d be holding me back and sabotaging my life.
The worst of it was, my dad probably knew exactly what he was doing. My mom would have told him enough about my relationship with Mark for him to know that Mark would do much more than move partway across the country if it was what was best for me.
A little ball of heat formed in my chest. I imagined it growing until I could shoot fire like a dragon. “We haven’t decided whether we’re moving back or not. We both have careers we enjoy in Fair Haven, so it’s not a decision to be made lightly.”
“Nicole.” My mom rose to her feet. “Could you help me with the dessert?”
The expression that flickered across her face worked as well as a bucket of ice water in putting out my anger. It almost looked like sadness. I hadn’t considered before that the strained relationship I had with my dad might negatively affect my mom.
I gathered up the empty plates and followed her into the kitchen without argument.
I hadn’t been wrong in what I’d said, but I probably shouldn’t have said it. I could have told Mark later to ignore him, that it’d been my choice to move to Fair Haven, and that my career wasn’t any more or less important than his. “I’m sorry, Mom.”
My mom barely acknowledged. Apologies were another thing that weren’t done in our family.
She pulled a white paper bag from the refrigerator and tucked the leftovers back inside. As I’d expected, the logo for the upscale restaurant they liked was emblazoned across the bag. So upscale that they technically called it catering rather than takeout. My tastes had never been as fancy once I moved out on my own, even before Fair Haven. Ahanti and I used to order Chinese and sit on one of our couches to eat it straight out of the containers.
That was it!
Only the knife I held to cut the cheesecake kept me from fist pumping the air. I could go to the Chinese restaurant we always used to order from, place an order for delivery, and request to put a note inside before it went out. That’s how I could communicate with Ahanti.
4
I leaned forward, pretending I wanted a better look at the painting on the wall in front of me. In my Chinese-food note the night before, I’d asked Ahanti to meet us in the section of the National Gallery of Art where they displayed seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish works. I knew from past visits that it was never as busy as the special exhibits or any of the areas dedicated to the artwork by the Italian masters.
It was also the only place I could think of where we’d be hard to spot, have to go through a security checkpoint before we came in, and Ahanti would have a reasonable excuse for leaving her phone in her car. While phones weren’t prohibited, photography was for certain collections, and loud conversations were strongly frowned upon. Ahanti would have normally brought her phone anyway, but I’d suggested in my note that she conveniently forget it.
My cell phone beeped with a text notification. Maybe Ahanti had decided a text was worth the risk and wanted to meet somewhere else. I grabbed for my phone so fast I almost shot it out of my hands and across the room.
The message wasn’t from Ahanti. It was from Mandy. Since I’d helped her when a murder happened at her bed-and-breakfast last month, she’d insisted on being the one who watched Velma and Toby while Mark and I were out of town. My business partner, Russ, would have been the better choice since Mandy would probably spoil both dogs, but I hadn’t been able to find a way to tell Mandy that that wouldn’t have hurt her feelings.
Do I have to use the leather leashes? Mandy wrote. They’re ugly, and you have nicer purple and blue ones.
I’d left two pages of instructions about the dogs in the hope that Mandy wouldn’t explode my phone with questions while I was gone. I should have known better. How the heck she’d ever found those colored leashes was beyond me. I’d set out the leather ones, and the last time I saw the nylon ones, they’d fallen behind the food bag.
If you don’t want to burn your hands, yes, I typed back.
I’d bought the pretty nylon leashes before I signed Velma up for obedience classes. At the very first introductory session, before we even brought our dogs with us, the instructor banned the kind of leashes I had because of how painful it could be if our dog yanked it through our hand.
I pocketed my phone again and moved on to the next painting.
Mark moved along with me. “How long past the meet time do we wait?”
I checked my watch. The meet time I’d written on my note passed ten minutes ago. Given DC-area traffic, ten minutes late wasn’t terrible. And we had no way of knowing what her appointments had been like for today. For all we knew, she’d had one she couldn’t reschedule or the one ahead ran long.
Ahanti came around a corner, and my shrug stalled out halfway up. I could tell the moment she spotted us because she veered sharply in our direction.
She walked straight into a hug. “Only you would think to hide a note in a bag of takeout.”
I didn’t have to be a lawyer or a police officer to identify the relief in her voice. It matched what I felt inside. I’d been right.
Then, just as quickly, I felt like a selfish jerk. I probably shouldn’t feel relieved that something was wrong rather than that she didn’t want to be my friend anymore, but I had to hope that whatever was wrong, we could fix. If she’d truly wanted to end our friendship, there’d have been nothing I could do.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “I’m not the only one who’s worried about you. I talked to Geoff when I got into town.”
There was a tremor in her hand as she brought it up to run through her hair. A matching shiver skittered over my skin. Ahanti’s hands never shook.
“I didn’t know any other way to keep him safe. Both of you safe.” She glanced back over her shoulder, like even now she expected someone to be watching or listening. “Two weeks ago, someone left a picture of Geoff and me on my desk in the back room. They’d burned out his face and wrote I love you more across the back.”
I leaned into Mark’s solid arm for support. “You broke up with Geoff to protect him.”
She nodded. “I did some reading about stalkers online, and a lot of what I saw made it sound like if whoever did this thought I belonged to him, he might hurt Geoff to save me from him, or some warped thinking like that.”
The sad part of my parents’ business was that we dealt with the perpetrators rather than the victims. I’d been on the defense counsel side of a couple stalking cases. Ahanti’s fears were justified. Stalkers could become violent to both the object of their obsession and anyone who stood between them and what they wanted from the person they were stalking.
They didn’t normally jump straight into this level of contact, though. They tended to escalate. It should have started with something much smaller.
Ahanti hadn’t told me about anything, either recently or back when we were neighbors. At least, not that I could recall. “Is this the first thing that’s happened that made you think you have a stalker?”
