Page 72 of Hunt Me, Daddy

“You keep saying that.”

“It keeps being true.”

I hated him a little. Not in a real way, but in a way that made my fingers ache to open the Watcher file and start cross-referencing him against every piece of wrongness in my life.

I finished my coffee. He watched me do it, but not in a way that felt like he was waiting for me to leave. More like he had decided I was entitled to the silence and would not interrupt it.

That was the thing I kept circling. Ivan Morozov should have felt invasive. He did not. The watcher had felt invasive, yes, from the crossword, the break-ins to my apartment, to the corrected camera outside my apartment building. All of it had been too much, too close, too impossible to prove.

Ivan, in person, felt like pressure contained by restraint, like a hand held near a flame without touching it. He asked me one last question before we stood.

“If someone wanted to move you off a dangerous trajectory, what would work?”

I looked at him. There was no softness in his face or obvious manipulation either. Just a man asking a question like the answer mattered more than whether he liked it or not.

“That depends,” I said.

“On?”

“Whether they wanted me safe or obedient.”

His eyes flashed.

“Ivan,” I said.

“Yes?”

“If you’re trying to warn me, you’re doing a very strange job.”

“I know.”

“If you’re trying to scare me off something, you should know it won’t work.”

“I know that too.”

“Then what exactly are you doing?”

For the first time all morning, he looked almost tired.

“Looking for another way.”

The answer moved through me like a draft under a locked door. I held his gaze for one breath. Two. Then I left before I asked him what he meant because I already knew I wouldn’t like the answer and even worse, I knew I’d want it anyway.

I walked home instead of taking a rideshare. I walked because I needed the city between me and Ivan Morozov. Boston cooperated by being itself with its sidewalks and brick buildings and the wind off the harbor cutting through my coat. People moved too fast and too close. I checked every window, every parked car, and every polished lobby panel. It was more a reflex now rather than a habit.

At one corner, I caught a dark coat two storefronts back and went cold. Then the man turned, and he was too short, too broad, wrong in the shoulders.

Not him.

It wasn’t the watcher.

By the time I reached my building, my thoughts had folded in on themselves too many times to be useful. Ivan’s questions. His patience. The way he had stepped around my test. The way he had said yes when I asked if he was worried about me.

The corrected light over the entrance was still working.

I looked up at it. Then at the adjusted camera. Then at the door.

“Don’t,” I muttered. No one on the sidewalk answered, which was probably for the best.