The words jumped out in purple block letters. What did it mean? I brought it to my nose and sniffed. Sweet and citrusy.
“Vanilla and orange?” I asked, looking at her.
She sat next to me and nodded. “Belle Gourmand. It was my perfume for years, but I stopped wearing it a while ago. It creeped me out too much.”
“Ex-boyfriend?”
“Maybe? I really don’t know. I’m pretty active online.” I nodded like this was new information. “My perfume isn’t a secret. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it. It could be a subscriber.” She glanced at the postcard in my hand but didn’t move to touch it. “It doesn’t seem like something anyone I’ve dated would do. I mean, they seemed normal at the time. But how well can you really know a person, anyway?”
She wasn’t wrong. People had a way of shocking the hell out of me. Hell, sometimes I even surprise myself.
“I don’t know why I panicked like that. Spraying it with my perfume is creepy, but the messages themselves are pretty tame. I get way worse messages from men online.”
“Such as?” I gritted out.
“The usual stuff. Dick pics, graphic fantasies, rape threats.”
My molars smashed together. “I need names.”
“I don’t know them.” She worried the inside of her cheek for a moment, then seemed to come to a decision. Her shoulders squared and she met my eyes. “I’m a cam girl, Jeremiah. Subscribers pay me a monthly fee to watch me do 1950s housewife shit naked. Make dinner, dust and vacuum, put together pretty floral arrangements. That kind of thing. I have no idea who my subscribers are unless they tell me. The host company handles subscriber accounts and financial payments, not me.”
“You report these threats to the police?” I kept my voice calm, but there was nothing calm about the rage surging inside me.
“The police? You want a cam girl to report rape threats to the police?” She rolled her eyes. “Mostly I just block them and move on with my day. It’s not like they can actually hurt me through a computer screen, even if it feels like they can.” She flicked the postcard with the tip of her nail as if she didn’t want it to contaminate her. “Maybe that’s why this bothers me so much. It proves they can find me offline.”
No return address. No stamp. No postmark. It hadn’t gone through the post office. Someone had hand-delivered it. How had they known she was here? Had theypaid someone to deliver the postcard, or was the asshole actually here in person?
“We’re circling back to that cam girl shit, just so you know. I’m not going to let it go.”
She flinched. “Does it matter?”
“Does it matter?” I repeated incredulously. “Of course it fucking matters, Lennon. Rape threats? Death threats? You can’t ignore that.”
“No, I mean—” She huffed a small laugh and shook her head. “I mean, does it matter to youpersonally, Jeremiah Bell, that I paid my bills by camming?”
Nowas the right answer, but it wasn’t the truthful one. I didn’t care that men had seen her naked. I didn’t even care that they had paid her for that privilege. That was before she had ever come to Wyoming. I’d had no claim on her then. I had no claim on her now, but that didn’t stop me from wanting her all to myself.
“It matters,” I said. “I’m jealous as hell, Lennon. But as long as I’m the only one touching you, it’s something I can live with. If camming is something you plan to keep doing, we need to find a way to keep you safe.”
“Jeremiah,” she said softly. The way she looked at me made my chest hurt. “There’s nothing you can do about it. If I report them, they find a way to create a new account and harass me from there. Don’t worry about it, okay? It’s not your problem.”
She actually believed that? I twisted to look at her. “It’s not a problem, Lennon. It’s a wrong. Problems havea solution. There’s no solution for wrongs. You have to cut them out or they will spread like cancer. It doesn’t matter if the wrong is happening to you or to someone you know, or to a complete stranger. Wrongs belong to everyone. You see it, you fix it. That’s what you do.”
“Whatyoudo, maybe,” she muttered. “Some of us are too busy trying to survive, and some of us are nothing but cowards.” She lifted her gaze to my face, her dark eyes searching mine. “You’re a good man, Jeremiah.”
“Am I?” My father’s words still echoed in my head.Sinner. Banished. Son of perdition. “I suppose goodness is in the eye of the beholder.”
She huffed, then grabbed my face with both hands. “Well, it’s my eyes doing the beholding, and I’m looking right at you. You’re a good man, Jeremiah.”
I swallowed past the sudden thickness in my throat. She couldn’t absolve me for sins she didn’t know I had committed. If I sank to my knees and confessed it all, would she still look at me like that? I wasn’t going to find out. Not today, and probably not ever. She would be gone from here in another month. Better for everyone that she didn’t carry my sins with her.
So instead I looked her dead in the eyes so she’d know I wasn’t fucking around, and said, “I’m going to ruin their lives, Lennon. Anyone who threatened you, I’ll ruin them. Is that what a good man would do?”
She considered that, and then her lips tilted up in a little smirk. “I’ll allow it.”
“Good. Now tell me about the postcards. When did you start receiving them?”
“About two years ago, I think. I got one every week for a couple of months. I thought they were funny at first. They were almost…friendly? I don’t know how to describe it. They would say nice things about my outfit or my new haircut. But then they started getting more judgmental. Telling me I shouldn’t be with the guy I was dating, or that I always made bad choices when it came to men. The postcards stopped when I moved apartments, and I was relieved. I didn’t get one for a couple of weeks. And then they started up again. That’s when I got scared. I moved again, and they found me again. My last apartment, it wasn’t even really mine. It took them longer to find me, but they did. A postcard arrived a few days before I came here, to Mercy River.”
