Page 91 of Stalker

She was my savior in the whole thing, actually. Without her and her own tech skills, I wouldn’t have known where to turn when I walked away from Hartington for the last time. She scooped me and my little pieces up and hid me away from the world and Dane’s watchful eyes while we made a plan. My whole life I had protected and guided Olivia,but she was there to do the same in my moment of need and I’d never be able to repay her for that.

After a few days of mental breakdowns and pity parties, I had to get another job and another plan. Because tears and self-pity didn’t pay the bills.

And since I didn’t have my apartment or savings account with Tyson anymore, I had a lot of fucking bills to pay.

Tyson.

Oof.

I didn’t know if I’d ever know the full story, but according to the news reports, a freak car accident on a rainy night outside of Boston left him permanently blind. I’m talking the kind of blind where they had to remove his actual eyeballs, blind.

I shuddered just thinking of it. Which I didn’t do often, because then I’d have to acknowledge how deep down I knew his loss of sight wasn’t from a car accident at all.

It was Dane’s doing. For what Tyson did to me.

And if I thought about Dane physically blinding a man for me, I got warm and fuzzy all over, in some warped sense of commitment and loyalty from him. Which wasn’t true at all, given he’d lied about something that was so much more important than Tyson.

He watched the video.

He saw my attack and didn’t tell me.

A part of my soul would never heal knowing he saw firsthand how broken I was. How all my little pieces fell apart in the first place.

No man could love someone through that. Not entirely. There would always be darkness around something that was supposed to be built in beauty.

So I ran.

Then I hid.

Until I just existed.

Working in a popular tourist hotel in Miami gave me enough mental stimulation to not want to stab a fork into my thigh to make sure I was still alive, but just barely. I used a fake name, thanks to Olivia, to get the job, and got a small studio apartment where I slept in between wild shifts. But that was it, that was the extent of my life, post Dane.

Or Lincoln.

I didn’t even know how to refer to him. So I didn’t.

I had just worked a double at the hotel, managing the night shift and staying when the day shift manager called in sick. The only benefit to doing doubles like that was I was so bone weary tired after it, there wasn’t much energy left to think in the end.

So as I slowly climbed up all four flights of stairs to my apartment, I didn’t have the energy to miss him. Or hate him. I didn’t even have the energy to think about him.

But when I started down the hallway toward my door, though, I noticed something laying on the ground outside my door, and I instantly saw his face in my mind. I saw the packages he had delivered to me in secret when I was right next to him in real life.

At first, I wasn’t sure it was at my door, thanks to the long row of apartments, but as I got closer, I realized it was.

And that’s when I stopped walking, afraid to get any closer to the large brown box sitting on the ground. My heart started racing in my chest as I stood immobilized.

Did he find me?

How?

I looked up and down the hallway, but it was empty. There was a bit of hope burning in my chest that as I looked behind me, he’d be standing there, watching me. But he wasn’t.

Would I feel awful embarrassment if I picked up the box only to realize it was meant for one of my neighbors and he still, in fact, didn’t care that I was gone?

I rolled my eyes to myself, intent on proving that it was, in fact, at my door by mistake, but as I leaned down and picked it up, it was my name on the label, with no return address.

My real name, not the one I’d been using for the last three months, either. Again, I looked up and down the empty hallway. Anxiety crawled up my spine as I undid the three locks on my door and rushed inside, with the box of uncertainty clutched in my arms.

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