That’s when I heard it. Faint, but real. Not the fridge or the heater or the plumbing. A voice: muffled, male, uncertain.
“Hello? Billie, are you okay?”
I froze, I looked around the room…nothing moved except my own reflection in the bedroom mirror, and the ghostly way my phone’s screen lit the wall.
“Hello?” The voice was louder now. Not in the apartment. Someplace tiny and echoing.
The phone. I picked it up, and sure enough, there was an active call in progress with, Detective Ramos. Cool, cool, cool.
My heart, which had just returned to a normal rhythm, started tap-tap-tapping again, now accompanied by a full-body flush of mortification. I pressed the phone to my ear and tried to sound like a person who definitely wasn’t calling the police because she thought her own houseplant was a stalker.
“Detective Ramos, hi, sorry. I… uh. I thought something was off at my place, but it’s actually fine. I must have dialed you accidentally while I was doing a security sweep. I’m so sorry. False alarm.”
There was a pause, the kind that lasts forever when you’re the idiot who calls a detective after ten p.m. for absolutely no reason.
“Are you sure?” he asked, sounding equal parts confused and concerned.
“Yep, yes, I’m sure.” I walked into the bathroom and stared at my reflection wishing I could climb through the mirror and hide in it. “It was just a feeling… I thought I was going to find a note, but there’s no note.”
“I’m not that far away,” he explained. “I’m only a few blocks. I can swing by, just check it out to make sure.”
“No, no, no don’t worry about it. I’m exhausted and going to bed.”
“It’s no trouble, I don’t mind.”
“Seriously, it was just a feeling. I’m good. Thanks, sorry I bothered you. Goodnight.”
I hung up the phone and set it on the sink, feeling like an idiot as I pulled my hair up in a bun. I’d never been one of those damsel-in-distress people, in fact I hated those characters in books, movies, TV shows. That’s what that phone call felt like.
After scooping my cleansing balm into my palms and rubbing them together, I slathered it on my face and massaged it into my skin then bent down and rinsed it off with warm water and a damp wash cloth.
I was wondering if I should message Adam back, tell him to come over after all. I did want to see him. But I knew I shouldn’t. I grabbed a dry towel and straightened at the sink. I was eeny-meeny-miny-moeing my decision, as I began to pat my wet face, when the bathroom’s quietness twisted. There was a silence I’d made peace with, city-hum and heater thumping, the steady rhythm of my own breathing. But now, it bent around something else. Instinct told me to turn. Every hair on my arms rose. Still, I didn’t move, just kept my eyes fixed on the mirror as I lowered the towel.
That’s when I saw her. Stacy. She was in bedroom, reflected perfectly in the vanity mirror, an apparition in real time. She wore a wool coat that looked too heavy for the weather and beneath it the glittery gown she’d had on tonight at the launch,her expression was unhinged. But the gun, black and ugly and shaking ever so slightly in her hand, didn’t care about my powers of observation. It was pointed straight at my spine.
My entire body froze. I was rooted to the bathmat, towel pressed to my face. I couldn’t even gasp. My mind was a gnawing white-out of confusion and horror, the word “gun” firing like a warning beacon in all directions.
Stacy didn’t move. The gun didn’t move. In the glass her eyes looked puffy and wild, rimmed with mascara that streaked down to the corner of her mouth like a cartoon villain’s. She looked both exhausted and electrified.
I finally managed to speak, but my voice was thin, so thin I could barely hear it over the blood in my ears. “Stacy, what are you doing?”
She flinched at my words, causing the gun to waver. She yanked it up higher, as if preparing for recoil. I heard a hiccup, a wet snuffling sound, and realized she was crying.
For a rapid, almost hallucinatory second, I imagined lunging for her, knocking the gun out of her hand, pinning her to the bedroom floor. But my back was to her, and I’d have to turn around. There was no way she wouldn’t see me coming.
“I’m sorry,” I tried again, but Stacy cut me off, the motion of the gun enough to slap the words out of my mouth.
She shook her head, so violently the streaks of mascara on her cheeks wobbled with the motion. “Stop. Don’t play dumb. I saw you talking to him tonight. I thought you got the message.” Her voice was raw, slurred with panic and rage, the kind of voice that had already been screaming for hours and was now running on the purest fumes. “You want to take my family and you don’t think there’s going to be consequences.”
My brain was working overtime, the way it did in the moments before losing consciousness, when you know you’ve made a catastrophic mistake but can’t quite piece together whatit was. I felt my hands go cold and my knees bend, just slightly, as if my body was already preparing to crumple. I shook my head as delicately as possible, trying not to set her off. “I don’t. I don’t want to.”
She glared, gun held up with both hands now, like she was steadying a camera to take a family portrait. “I know you dated him!” She spat the words with an upward jerk of the nose, the veins in her neck bulging blue and angry. “Don’t lie. I saw the messages on the app and I saw you tonight.”
“I didn’t know he was married. He said his name was Ronan. I swear I can show you,” I blurted, hoping my voice still sounded human and not like the desperate animal I’d become
I made a slow move toward the phone on the counter, lowering my arm, palms out. She took a step forward so fast I heard her heel scuff the hardwood. “Don’t move! I’m not stupid! I know you’ll call the cop back!”
Cop back? Detective Ramos. I’d dialed him by accident, and for the first time in my life, I wished I was the kind of person who called the police unnecessarily, a chronic alarm-puller. Why hadn’t I just asked him to come over? If I had, he’d be here by now, or at least on his way.
