I should have ignored it. I knew I should ignore it. Instead, I rolled over and picked it up, the screen lighting the ceiling white.
A notification from the hosting platform. A new comment.
I opened it.
Nice view from Riverside Pines tonight. Keep your blinds down.
I read it twice. Then a third time, slower, like the words might rearrange themselves into something less specific. Something that couldn’t possibly mean what it meant.
They didn’t.
I took a screenshot.
Then I deleted the comment from the platform, like that would undo the fact I’d seen it at all.
My phone went face-down on the nightstand, but I kept staring at it anyway, waiting for it to change, or for me to realize I’d misunderstood. Waiting for my nervous system to get the memo that I was not, in fact, being chased by a lion.
The room felt smaller than it had a minute ago, as I lay still and listened to the river, my sharp, rapid breathing, and the faint creak of the trailer settling around me. Every sound suddenly felt louder than it should’ve been.
The comment hadn’t asked me anything. Hadn’t threatened me. Hadn’t even used my name.
But it didn’t need to.
My mouth had gone dry.
I got up too fast, the movement sharper than I intended.
First, the door. Locked. I checked it anyway, hand lingering on the handle a second too long, like touch could tell me something eyesight couldn’t.
Then again. Just to be sure.
The windows came next. Front, side, bathroom, bedroom. Locked, locked, locked, locked.
I pulled every shade flush to the sill and didn’t let myself linger at any of them.
Then I went to the kitchen drawer—the one I kept jammed with all the random crap I didn’t want to think about. I pushed everything aside and found what Matt had put there back when Travis had first started showing up again. The canister of pepper spray, small and orange and solid in my hand. The personal alarm, a flat silver disc that he’d made me test twice until I knew exactly how hard to pull the pin. Just in case, he’d said. You probably won’t need it. But now you have it.
I brought both back to the bedroom. Set them on the nightstand, pepper spray on the left, alarm on the right, phone in the middle, face-up so I’d see it light. Then I pulled my old baseball bat from under the bed and put it next to my pillow.
I looked at the arrangement for a moment.
My phone was right there. I could call Harper. I could call Matt. The thought moved through me, and I let it pass without acting on it, the way I always did. It was late. It was probably nothing. Three people standing by the river in the dark wasn’t exactly a crime, and if I called every time something felt slightly off, I’d be that woman, the one who needed managing, the onepeople started to worry about in that particular exhausting way. I’d been that woman to enough people lately. I was tired of it.
That was what I told myself, anyway.
The other version, the one I didn’t look at directly, was simpler and less flattering. I didn’t call because calling meant saying it out loud, and saying it out loud meant admitting that the unease sitting low in my stomach was real and not something I could just decide my way out of before morning. It was easier to arrange the pepper spray and the baseball bat and the alarm into their neat little row and tell myself I’d handled it. That I was prepared. That prepared was the same thing as safe.
I got back into bed, pulled the blanket up, and stared at the ceiling.
Matt had given me those things as if they were precautionary. I had a feeling he’d be less surprised than he should be when I told him I’d moved them to the nightstand.
As I drifted off again, one thought clung, cold and stubborn. What was going on out there?
Maybe it was nothing.
I almost believed it.
It had to be nothing.
