Page 37 of Hunt Me, Daddy

She had a knife.

Such a clever girl. Good girl.

The praise rose in me before I could stop it, and this time I did not correct myself.

She stood in the bedroom doorway first, letting her eyes adjust. She did not rush in. She did not whisper some foolish question into the dark, as though an intruder might feel socially obligatedto answer. She waited. Listened. Then she checked the closet first, then the blind angle beside the dresser, then the space behind the door.

My place on the fire escape gave me only pieces of her through the narrow edge of the window. Her hand on the closet door. Her shoulder turning. The shadow of her profile. Her mouth pressed into a flat line that made my chest tighten.

She reached the bed and for one terrible second, she stopped.

I went perfectly still. She stared at the bed for so long that my jaw began to ache. Then she crouched and checked beneath it.

Practical girl.

Mine, said the thing inside me that had stopped asking permission.

She left the bedroom. I stayed where I was, one hand wrapped around the cold railing, listening. The bathroom door opened. The shower curtain rings rasped softly. She walked back into the kitchen. Then the living room. The quiet little sounds of a woman disassembling her own safety one piece at a time because she trusted nothing, not even the absence of proof.

I had done that to her.

I should have felt guilty about that, but I didn’t.

I heard a cabinet open. The clink of a glass. The opening of a bottle. The soft glug of liquor poured too generously. She sat on the couch with her back to the brick wall.

I could see her from the fire escape if I shifted two inches left. I did not at first. Then, because restraint had already become a burned-out structure in the distance, I shifted.

She had not opened her laptop. It sat on the coffee table within arm’s reach, closed. Her hand rested near it once, fingers hovering over the lid, then withdrew as if the machine had become something alive and untrustworthy. She took a drink instead, whiskey apparently, grimaced faintly at the burn, and stared at nothing.

Two hours passed.

I knew because I counted every minute.

I remained on the fire escape, half-hidden in the dark, body locked into stillness until discomfort became irrelevant. Boston moved below us in wet flashes of light and sound. Cars hissed through puddles. A car horn wailed somewhere in the distance. Wind came between the buildings in narrow cold streams, pulling at my coat.

I watched her not work.

That should not have affected me as much as it did.

Kit Calloway worked the way other people breathed. Every pattern I had built of her depended on that one constant. When she was afraid, she worked. When she was tired, she worked. When a threat moved closer, she documented, analyzed, trapped, and mapped it out. Her laptop was a weapon, shield, confession, and escape all at once.

For two hours, she did not touch it.

She sat with her drink in one hand and her back to the wall, staring into the dim apartment as though every object had betrayed her by remaining where it belonged.

I wanted to go back inside.

Sit across from her.

Take the glass from her hand.

Tell her to breathe normally before she made herself dizzy. Tell her the apartment was clear. Tell her I had already checked. Tell her she was not alone in this anymore, whether she liked it or not.

Then she would ask how I knew.

And the whole thing would burn.

She finished the drink eventually but did not pour another. Her restraint pleased me, which was another sign that I had lost any claim to sanity. She stood, checked the door, checked the windows, checked the bedroom again. When she returned to the living room, she picked up the laptop. She carried it to her desk, set it down, and walked away.