Page 3 of Protected By Razor

She squeezes my shoulder. She’s about my mother’s age and she has the kindest hands of anyone I’ve ever met. I hold it together until she walks away.

I did the right thing. I know I did the right thing.

So why do I feel like I’ve just stepped in front of a bus?

Two days later I find a note on my car windscreen.

Folded once, tucked under the wiper. I see it before I get to the car and I know. I don’t know how I know, but I do.

Mind your own business.

No signature. Block capitals, black ink, pressed hard enough into the paper that I can feel the indents on the back.

I look around the car park. It’s nearly empty. Late shift, nearly dark, the lights just coming on. My hands are shaking again. I stuff the note into my bag and I get into the car and I lock the doors before I’ve even got my seatbelt on.

I drive home.

I don’t realise the car is behind me until I’m three streets from my apartment.

It’s a dark blue sedan. Could be anyone. I tell myself it could be anyone. I take a right I don’t normally take, and the sedan takes a right. I take another right, making a full square around the block. The sedan takes another right.

My chest goes cold.

I don’t go home. I don’t even slow down. I drive past my building and I keep driving, down into the grid of streets I’ve known since I was nineteen, and I end up outside Kate’s apartment with my heart in my mouth and no memory of the last ten minutes.

The sedan isn’t behind me anymore. I don’t know when it peeled off. I don’t know if I imagined the whole thing.

I sit in the car for a full minute before I can make my legs work.

Kate pours me a glass of wine before I’ve finished taking my coat off.

“Sit,” she says.

I sit.

Kate’s apartment is a mess in the way that makes me feel better about my own life — scarves draped over the backs of chairs, a stack of books teetering on the coffee table, a candle burning that smells like a forest. She’s wearing an enormous hoodie that was definitely a boyfriend’s once. Her hair is twisted up with a pen.

She looks at my face and her whole expression changes.

“Darce. Start from the beginning.”

So I do. The dog. The man. The note. I leave the car until last because I’m still not sure if I imagined it, and when I get to that part my voice wobbles and Kate puts her wine down very carefully on the table.

“You were followed,” she says.

“I don’t know for sure??—”

“Darcie.”

“It might have been a coincidence.”

“Three turns?”

I don’t answer. I know she’s right. I knew she was right when I was doing the third turn.

Kate gets up. She paces to the window and back. She’s in her bare feet, and her mouth is pressed into a hard flat line, and I can see her thinking about it, putting it together, cycling through the options the way she cycles through every problem she’s ever solved for me since we were fifteen.

“You need to go to the police,” she says.