"You doing okay, though? You look" he tilted his head, studying me with that gentle attention of his, "tired. Good-tired, maybe. But watchful. Like you're listening for something under the noise."
I laughed it off. "Occupational hazard. Work enough nights in this place and everything starts to sound like footsteps."
"Sure." He held my eyes a half beat longer than the joke had earned. "Well. I'm around. You know that. Whatever it turns out to be."
And I did know it, and it was a comfort, and that is the part I have never been able to forgive myself for since.
The scare came near three, the dead hour, when the floor goes quiet and your own footsteps start to sound like somebody else's. I went to the staff stairwell, the back one, the one that needs a badge and a punched-in code, that patients never lay eyes on, because I needed ninety seconds of nobody. On the landing, taped to the cinderblock at precisely my eye level, was a single sheet of paper.
It was not a note this time. It was worse, because it was nothing at all. A blank page, taped to a wall in a place only someone with a badge and the door code could reach, left there for no reason except to tell me that he could leave things there. That the badge and the code were not a wall. That the one cornerof this building that was supposed to be only us was, now, also him.
I did not scream. I am proud of that and I should not be, because the not-screaming is only the stalker training me, teaching my body to swallow its own alarm so I can keep functioning, which is exactly what he is after. I took the page down. I held it by one corner and no more, because some cold animal part of me was already thinking about prints and Maks and chain of custody, which tells you everything about what my life had become. Then I went back to the floor and finished my shift, because the floor does not care about your stalker. The floor has a toddler with a febrile seizure in Bay Two, and I was grateful for him, grateful for anything that needed me more than I needed to come apart.
But the walls were thinner after that. The badge readers, the locked doors, the signs that said staff only, all of it had been quietly demoted from protection to suggestion, and every coworker who passed me in the corridor, every familiar and friendly face, now carried a new and unbearable question behind it. Because a blank page in a badge-locked stairwell is not left by a stranger off the street. It is left by one of us.
That was the thought I could not set down for the rest of the night, the one that turned every kind hello into a maybe. The call, it turned out, was coming from inside the family. Not the city. Not a stranger on a train. Not a faceless man on a fire escape. Somebody who knew my coffee order and my schedule and the code to the back stairs. Somebody who belonged.
I was three steps from the doors, Petya already bringing the car around and the night all but survived, when my phone buzzed against my hip.
Unknown number. A photo. I opened it before my brain could stop my thumb, the way you always do, the way he is counting on.
It was me. Tonight. Minutes ago, by the look of it, bent over the restock cart, my head down, a small private smile on my face that I did not remember wearing and would now never wear unwatched again.
The photo was taken inside the hospital, minutes ago, from an angle only one of us could reach.
Beneath it, there was a caption.
You look better when you smile at me.
And standing in the bright, clean lobby of the only place on earth I had ever felt entirely myself, with Petya forty feet away and my whole life one message from coming apart, I finally understood the true shape of the thing that had been hunting me all this time. He had not followed me here. He had never needed to. He was already here. He had been here the whole time, in a set of scrubs or a badge or a kind voice in a supply room, one of the people I had trusted with the worst nights of strangers' lives.
The call was not coming from outside the walls.
It was coming from inside the house.
16
KOLYA
Icame back to the compound at the worst possible hour with the worst possible thing in my chest, which is fear that has nowhere to go. I had spent the day in that obscene little gallery looking at my own face circled in red, and I had driven home wanting only one thing, to put my hands on the woman those walls were papered with and confirm with my own touch that she was still here, still warm, still mine. Instead I came through the door and Petya would not meet my eyes, and Maks put a phone in my hand without a word, and on the phone was a photograph of Ruby at the supply station of her hospital, taken from across the room, taken hours earlier, with a caption I will not repeat, and the fear with no outlet finally found one.
She was in the kitchen, eating cold rice straight out of the pot like a woman who had survived something and not yet told anyone, and she looked up at me, read my face, and went still.
"You saw it," she said.
"You went to work."
"With your blessing and four of your men. You were standing right there when I left, Kolya. You set the rules. Petya was four feet from me the whole"
"And he photographed you anyway. From across a room full of your own people. With Petya four feet away." I heard my own voice doing the thing it does when I am most afraid, going quiet and flat and cold, the register men have learned to fear more than shouting. "You are not going back there."
"Excuse me?"
"You heard me. The hospital is finished. We will find you another way to be a nurse, somewhere I can wall, somewhere he cannot reach you. But you are not walking back into that building."
"That building is my life, Kolya."
"It is where he gets to you. I have watched him do it for weeks. He is better than my men. He stood under your window, he sat in your car, and now he has walked into the one place you feel safe and taken your picture forty feet from a man I trusted to stop precisely that. I am not going to give him a second attempt."
