Page 32 of Dread

“Takes time,” I said.

“I know. I’m being patient.” She selected a brown crayon and began drawing what appeared to be a steak. The lines were vigorous. Committed. The steak acquired grill marks, a bone handle, and what might have been a smile, though it was hard to tell with steak.

I sipped my coffee. Set the mug down. Looked at the fruit plate, then at the Fats/Oils section, which was still blank.

“Is a Popsicle its own food group?” I asked.

Ellie’s hand stopped. The brown crayon hovered above the steak, and her face went through a series of expressions very quickly -- confusion, consideration, the brightening that happens when a child realizes an adult has said something ridiculous on purpose -- and then she was laughing. Not a giggle. A full laugh, the kind that comes from the diaphragm and involves the whole body, her shoulders shaking, the stool rocking slightly beneath her, and the sound of it filled the kitchen in a way that made the coffee taste better and the morning feel lighter than it had any right to.

“Popsicles are dessert,” she said, wiping her eyes with the back of her wrist. “Dessert isn’t a food group, Doc. It’s extra.”

“Good to know. I’ve been misclassifying my inventory.”

She went back to her steak, still smiling, the crayon moving with renewed purpose, and I reached for the apple slices and ate them one by one while she worked, because someone needed to make a dent in the pile.

The footsteps in the hallway were different this time. Heavier. Slower. The cadence of someone who was awake but taking her time about it, and when I looked up, Katy was standing in the doorway.

Her hair was loose. Full loose, same as it got when she’d slept on it wet, chestnut brown falling past her shoulders in waves that the braid had been holding back for days. She held her coffee mug in both hands -- the blue one she’d claimed on day three without announcing it -- and looked at the poster and the plate of fruit.

Then she looked at me. Her mouth curved into a small smile. I held her gaze over Ellie’s head. The child between us, bent over her steak drawing, completely absorbed in the work of a morning that she had decided was worth taking seriously. Katy’s eyes were warm. Tired in the good way -- the fatigue that comes from sleeping flat on your back for the first time in years instead of curled on your side listening for sounds that don’t belong.

She didn’t smile. Didn’t need to. The look was enough -- acknowledgment, quiet and complete, the gravity of two people who had stopped pretending that the thing growing between them was temporary or accidental or anything other than exactly what it appeared to be.

I went back to the apples. Ellie’s crayon scratched. The coffee steamed. The knife on the cutting board caught the light through the window, and the morning continued around us, ordinary and mine in a way that mornings hadn’t been mine for longer than I wanted to measure.

* * *

The waiting room had emptied by three-fifteen. I could hear the front desk through my open door -- keyboards clicking, the low murmur of the receptionist on the phone with a pharmacy, the sounds of a clinic settling into its end-of-day rhythm. I had three charts left. Hip replacement follow-up. Well-child check that had run long because the mother had questions about ear infections and I’d taken the time to answer them. A medication refill that required a call to the specialist in Columbia, which I’d put off until tomorrow because the specialist’s office closed at four.

My desk was clean. It had been clean for years. Patient files in the center, aligned with the edge of the blotter. Pen to the right. Coffee mug to the left, empty, the ring it had left on the wood darkened to a permanent stain. The computer monitor showed the EMR, the patient list scrolled to the bottom where the afternoon appointments lived, all of them checked out, all of them documented, the work of the day nearly done.

The phone rang.

The landline, not my cell. The clinic line, the one on my desk that patients rarely used because everyone had cell phones now and the younger staff regarded the landline the same way they regarded fax machines -- with polite confusion, as if it were a relic that had been left behind by accident. The display read BLOCKED.

I picked up. “Dr. Thomas.”

Silence on the other end. Not dead air -- the pressurized silence of an open line where someone was breathing but not speaking. I waited. Three seconds. Four. The receptionist’s voice carried from the front desk, distant and muffled through the wall, and the HVAC kicked on with its usual metallic sigh.

A click. The line went dead.

I set the receiver down. A few minutes ago, I’d been thinking about Ellie’s poster and the way Katy had looked at me from the kitchen doorway.

That part of the day was over.

Second blocked call this week. The first had come a few days back, same time of day, same silence, same click. I’d logged it. Made a note in the clinic security file, which was a spreadsheet on the shared drive that nobody but me ever looked at. Called it an anomaly because anomalies existed and most of them were nothing.

This wasn’t nothing.

I pulled up the clinic’s exterior camera feed on my desktop. Four angles, covering the parking lot, the front entrance, the side delivery door, and the street view from the second-floor window that the previous owner had rigged before selling me the building. The feed was grayscale, timestamped in the corner, refreshing every thirty seconds. I scrolled back two hours.

The parking lot showed nothing unusual. My truck in its usual spot. The receptionist’s Honda. The delivery door camera caught a UPS driver at eleven-forty-three, package left at the door, driver gone before the timestamp rolled over. The front entrance was quiet -- an elderly patient leaving at twelve-seventeen, moving slowly toward a sedan parked at the far end of the lot.

The street view was the one that mattered. The camera mounted above the second-floor window looked directly across Main Street at the angled parking in front of the hardware store. Empty spaces mostly. A county maintenance truck at eleven-fifty, gone by twelve-thirty. A sedan I didn’t recognize parked at the far end for twenty minutes around one o’clock, driver never visible.

And there, at twelve-oh-three, timestamp clear in the corner: a dark blue Chevy Silverado. Parked directly across from the clinic’s front entrance, engine running based on the faint plume from the exhaust pipe, driver’s window partially down. The resolution wasn’t good enough to make out a face. Just a shape behind the wheel, dark clothing, the particular silhouette of a man sitting in a vehicle with nowhere particular to be.

The truck was gone by twelve-twenty. Replaced by an empty parking space that looked exactly like every other empty parking space on Main Street except that I knew, with the certainty that comes from years of reading threat patterns, that it wasn’t.