Page 53 of Stalker

But it never made me happy, at least not in the way I wanted to be. The pressure was unbearable on my shoulders.

Do the right thing, Peyton. Lead by example, Peyton. Show your sisters what they can have if they work hard too, Peyton.

And then I met Tyson. God, what a fucking idiot I had been seeing his flashy job and over the top ego and thinking it would ease some of that burden if I found a guy who could shoulder some of it.

WRONG!

Tyson was the opposite of that; he was a fucking sandbag tied to my neck that I had to carry around with me on top of everything else. The only reason I kept him around was because it made my parents happy to see mewithsomeone. They didn’t know the real him; the needy, controlling, manipulating, unfaithful him. But it eased their minds a little, knowing I hadsomeonein the world at my side.

Now that I had been away from him on my terms instead of his, though, I knew I could never go back. Because the truth was, Tyson was abusive.

He never hit me. I think we both knew I’d probably hit him back if he tried. But he did manipulate me. He held things over my head and isolated me until one day I woke up and he was really my only option to keep moving forward. To leave him, would mean I’d have to go backwards for a ways.

I’d have to start over.

And I couldn’t stomach the look on my parent’s faces if I told them I needed help, after all of these years. So I stayed. At least I had, until I found the job posting for Mr. Bryce’s housekeeper. In three months, I’d make enough for a fresh start.

And then I’d be truly free.

Yet, for some reason, since meeting Dane, the idea of being free from any other person in the world didn’t hold the same appeal it had a few months ago.

God, I fucking missed Dane’s presence in my life. Which was fucked up. That was like a prisoner saying they missed the guards, always watching them once they were free.

But it was true.

I probably would have been able to avoid thinking about him more than I had if Mr. Bryce hadn’t made an emergency trip somewhere, leaving me alone with idle time on my hands.

For a man who never left his estate, according to Mrs. Straight, he had left twice since I began working for him already.

I snorted to myself at the thought. Maybe I was the problem.

The dinner fiasco had ended terribly the other night, and then when I got up the next morning, after the maze fiasco, there had been an email waiting for me, announcing his unplanned departure.

Return date- to be announced.

So I sat. And I wondered. And I worried.

I grabbed my glass of wine from the side table next to the chair and caught a glance of the phone Dane left me that night.

It just sat there, mocking me because I had yet to go through it. Frankly, I was afraid of what I’d see. Afraid of what I’d feel when he proved me wrong. It didn’t help that I had zero way of communicating with him to tell him I fucked up, because the creepy messages he sent me were only accessible after he initiated the conversation. And then they’d go away when he closed them out.

The shrill ringtone of my actual phone scared me as it started going off next to Dane’s phone.

“Hello, Olivia.” I sighed, answering my sister’s fourth attempt to call today alone.

“I’m coming to Hartington.” She snapped in response. “I’m rescuing you and dragging you back home by your fucking hair for how much trouble you’ve put me through the last few weeks.”

I snorted humorlessly as I took a sip of my wine. “You’re still as dramatic as ever.”

“You take a job, on a whim, two hours away from home, picking up your entire life for achange, and then you have the audacity to suddenly become unreachable. Every single time any of us tries, you ghost us.” She huffed, “And then you end up with an actual ghost on your computer and have the audacity to call me dramatic?”

“Wait,” I sat up, fighting away the warm buzz of the wine. “What did you say about my computer?”

She sighed so loud my ear ached in its wake. “You were hacked. And I don’t know when the middle east started using ghosts to steal credit card information and identities, but nonetheless you’re completely infiltrated.”

“Olivia Everett, if you don’t start at the beginning, I’m excommunicating you.” I warned, already tired of her theatrics.

“Ugh!” She sassed, “I hacked your computer because you wouldn’t fucking answer your phone and you left me with no choice. But when I got into it, I hit a fucking wall so thick I couldn’t even break through the system I had installed on it in the first place.” I could hear clicking in the background as her words swirled around in my head. “At first anyway. It actually took me three days of constant work to get in, and once I did, I was stuck in ghost land. Someone hacked you and used a completely untraceable system to do it. But they can see everything. Literally everything. Even your computer camera was hacked, on multiple occasions.”

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