Page 57 of Sexting My Ex’s Dad

She’s gone.

My chest tightens in a way I don’t enjoy naming. This is the sudden understanding that I’ve been walking around my entire life pretending I’m immune to loss, and now I’ve lost her in one day.

I turn back toward the landlady. “Did she leave a forwarding address?”

She shakes her head sadly, perhaps sensing the plea in my question. “No,” she says. “I’m really sorry.”

I nod once then step back from the building. My hands feel empty without purpose.

My mind runs through options fast. Security. Police. HR. Every tool I’ve ever used to solve a problem. Every way to track a person down.

Then I recall three important things. Athena blocked me, resigned, and paid for a new lock and left the rest of her life behind.

She doesn’t want to be found. I stand on the sidewalk and stare at the building like it’s going to open its mouth and tell me where she went.

The landlady shifts again, watching me with open sympathy now. “Sir,” she says quietly. “If she ran, she had a reason.”

I nod without looking at her. “I know.”

I know, and I should’ve been the reason she stayed.

11

ATHENA

23:31 P.M., PREVIOUS NIGHT

Running isn’t on my agenda just yet.

I lie in bed with the phone glowing beside me, re-reading the message until the letters feel carved into the inside of my eyelids. The picture is worse than the words, and the words are bad enough. Nathan’s hand on my thigh under the table, my face turned toward him like I trusted the moment, and someone close enough to capture it cleanly.

My fingers hover over the screen like I can press it hard enough to erase the whole night. I don’t do anything useful for a long minute. The first thought in my head is Nathan. The second thought is that if I tell him, I might light the fuse I’m trying to outrun.

I sit up slowly and turn on the bedside lamp, then I scan the room like I expect to find a person hiding behind my laundry basket. The apartment is still the same cramped space I pay too much for. The silence is normal. The lock on my door looks normal.

My hands aren’t.

They keep clenching around nothing.

I grab my phone again, open the message thread, then tap the number at the top. Unknown. No name. No profile photo. No little clue to hold on to. I take a screenshot, then another, and I save the images to a hidden folder out of reflex, the way I do at work when something needs documentation.

I told myself I’d go to the police first thing in the morning.

That was the plan. That was the responsible adult move. Print the screenshots, file a report, show them the threat, get it on record, and let the system do whatever the system does when a woman says she’s being watched.

Then my brain supplies the part it doesn’t want to say out loud.

The system will ask who. The system will ask why. The system will ask whether I’m in danger at home. The system will ask whether there’s someone powerful involved.

And the second I say Nathan’s name in any form, even as a fact in a chain of events, it stops being my problem and becomes his too.

I swing my legs off the bed and walk to the kitchen without turning on overhead lights. The floor feels cold under my feet. I fill a glass of water, take three slow sips, then stare out the window at the street below like it holds an answer.

A part of me wants to call Nathan anyway. Not the boss. Not the doctor. The man who put his hand on my thigh like he meant it, the man who looked at me in the hallway and made me feel chosen for a full minute.

Then the dinner conversation returns, sharp and humiliating.

Tools. Agendas. Leverage.