Downstairs, the latch held.
My eyes went heavy, but I watched Colt’s hands open and stay open while the night decided if it would keep our secret. We didn’t take it back.
In the morning I’d try to call it something smaller, less significant. Tonight, it was exactly its size.
His breath dragged beside me.
Blue light skimmed the ceiling before it moved on. Colt kept his hands open until it passed.
EPILOGUE
BLAIR
I powereddown my office lamp and slid the last desk drawer shut with my hip. I checked the door the way I always did. Reading the seam, the way metal acknowledged metal.
It had lied to me before, so I was wary.
I’d referred Colt out and the handoff was logged by another clinician. Clean line, no ceremony.
Three days since the front porch incident. Short enough to still live in my muscles, long enough for the story to shape into fact.
I walked down the hallway and flicked off the lights as I moved. My hand stayed on the knob and refused to turn. I told myself the street would be empty the way it always was this time of night. That I preferred it that way.
Both were lies.
The truer sentence stood behind them: he’d be there. We’d never made an arrangement. No message or invitation. Yet a pattern had formed.
A quiet frequency I could tune to.
Another lie tried itself on. If he wasn’t there, I’d keep walking. If he was, my body would know before I saw.
I stood motionless with my hand on the knob, listening as if the building might answer. Fluorescents settled in the background. My pulse argued for both outcomes at once.
Stalker, my mind offered.
Patient, another part said.
Neither word landed as a threat, but the question itself carried all the heat.
Outside, the night separated into a scene I’d seen a thousand times before. Several moving parts: a bus exhaled two blocks over and a crosswalk counted down with red certainty. A camera’s LED blinked and tossed a dot onto the market’s glass across the street. The prickle of being watched found my skin yet again. But this time, I let it stand.
Witness, not victim.
I took each step slowly, my footsteps announcing me to the city. Rubber on grit, the soft snap as the curb took my weight.
I turned toward the dark stretch of street where an answer would live. I walked, a man bound by a spell of his own making.
If he was there, the machinery in me would hear it first; the ease of his breath in the truck, a man who chose stillness over display.
I scanned the curb and tried to want the nothing that would prove me reasonable.
Colt was there. Not outside my door like an ask. But down the block under a streetlight with the engine off and the windshield fogged at the corners.
No lights flashed, no horn honked. Presence I could feel without claim.
He parked with the kind of discipline that turned his truck into background. If you didn’t know what you were looking for.
But I knew exactly what I was looking for.
