Page 81 of Letters From A Stalker

“Thank you.” There is no joke attached. No sarcasm.

I meet her eyes. “You don’t need to thank me for believing you.”

Her expression shifts slightly. “I know.”

Then she leaves. I watch the door close behind her and remain where I am until the sound of her footsteps disappears toward reception.

15

Julia

Mid-morning on a Saturday, I cleaned three rooms that were not particularly dirty, reorganized the kitchen cabinet nobody but me will ever inspect, and discovered that owning a vacuum with multiple attachments does not automatically mean I understand what any of them are intended to do. The house smells faintly of lemon cleaner and the cinnamon candle burning on the kitchen counter, while Fleetwood Mac plays from the speaker in the living room loudly enough to follow me from room to room without giving Mrs. Pritchard a reason to come over and investigate whether I have finally lost my mind.

Tessa isn’t coming until six. This means I have approximately seven hours to prepare my house for a woman who has seen me vomit into a hotel ice bucket, held my hair while I cried over a man who did not deserve the moisture, and once spent an entire weekend sleeping beside me in a bed covered with clean laundry because neither of us could be bothered to fold it. Naturally, the baseboards need attention. I straighten from where I have been wiping one beside the living-room bookshelf and stare at the cloth in my hand.

“This is therapy’s fault.”

Nobody responds, probably because normal people don’t blame their psychiatrists when they begin cleaning architectural details. I toss the cloth onto the coffee table and sit back on my heels.

Thursday has been following me around since Thursday. Not in the way the session with Mom did, when memories seemed to crawl into everything and I came home feeling as though somebody had emptied me onto the floor and neglected to provide instructions for reassembly. This one feels quieter. Settled, almost, which seems strange considering what I told Kai. I have spoken about that night before. More than once. Previous therapists knew. I did the work people are supposed to do afterward, even if some of it happened years later than it probably should have. I learned what freezing was. I learned what dissociation was. I learned that intoxication and impairment did not become consent simply because I had voluntarily walked through somebody’s front door. I stopped reacting every time a man with brown hair and brown eyes stood too close to me because. As I told Kai, I refused to let one ordinary-looking asshole claim half the male population as his personal trigger warning.

For years, I considered the matter mostly dealt with. Not erased because that isn’t how memory works, but healed enough that it no longer directed my life. Apparently there had still been one small piece of it lodged somewhere in the back of my mind, where I couldn’t quite reach.

You don’t have to forgive yourself for not fighting him. There is nothing to forgive.

I sit on the floor and lean my back against the sofa. That sentence has come back more than anything else Kai said. Not because nobody ever told me it wasn’t my fault. People have. Therapists have explained freeze responses in substantially more clinical language. I’ve read articles, books and enough online material over the years to qualify for an honorary degree in all the ways a nervous system can malfunction when somebody violates it. But somehow I had continued treating my eighteen-year-old self as though she had failed an exam. Not enough to consciously blame her, just enough to keep asking whether she could have done better.

Could I have yelled louder?

Could I have forced my arms to move?

Could I have scratched him, kicked him or found enough strength to roll away?

Could I have realized sooner that the heaviness in my body wasn’t normal drunkenness?

Could I have refused to enter the house?

Could I have done something that would have made what happened look more like the kind of rape people believe without requiring an explanation?

It hadn’t occurred to me until Thursday that even asking those questions meant some part of me was still holding her responsible. I had spent sixteen years forgiving a girl who had nothing to apologize for. That realization hurt. Then, strangely, it didn’t. There had been no dramatic breakthrough in Kai’s office. No cinematic collapse followed by the sudden understanding that I am healed now — congratulations, please collect your complimentary tote bag on the way out. I had simply driven home afterward and realized I believed him. There was nothing to forgive.

I close my eyes for a moment, resting my head against the sofa cushion behind me.

Maybe that is what healing looks like when most of the wound has already closed. Not something repairing itself in front of you, but finally removing the tiny piece of glass that kept catching whenever you pressed the wrong spot. My eyes open. Unfortunately, emotional growth has done nothing whatsoever for the dust beneath the bookshelf.

I push myself back onto my feet.

“Rude.”

I turn toward the kitchen for another cloth and make it halfway across the living room before my attention catches on the narrow drawer beneath the console table. My movement stops before I consciously decide to. I know what is inside it. The black envelope has been there since Tuesday morning. I moved it from the coffee table before work because leaving anonymous stalker correspondence displayed beside the remote seemed a little too much like accepting it as home décor. I considered throwing it away, then decided I should probably keep it in case another one appeared and I eventually needed proof. That would be the sensible explanation. The fact that I have opened the drawer twice since then just to look at it is significantly less sensible. I stand there for several seconds before pulling the drawer open. Black paper against pale wood. Broken red wax. Little Ember written across the front. My stomach does that same strange little shift it has performed every time I’ve looked at those words.

There hasn’t been another letter. Five days. No second envelope against the front door, no note beneath the windshield wiper of my car, nothing inside the mailbox and no unexplained sensation of somebody standing beyond the windows at night. I should be relieved. I am relieved. Mostly. That mostly has been irritating the absolute shit out of me since Wednesday. Because there is apparently something humiliating about receiving one deeply inappropriate declaration of obsessive interest and then discovering that even your stalker may have reconsidered. I pull the envelope from the drawer before common sense has time to object.

“This is how women die in documentaries.”

I break my own rule and slide the letter out again. I know nearly every line now. That fact alone should probably concern me.

I watch you.