Chapter 38. Thirty-One

Wren POV

I didn't sleep. I didn't answer him either.

I sat on my bed with the phone in both hands and read the three words over and over until they stopped being words.

You know my voice.

I did. I knew it better than I knew my own, because I hadn't heard my own in two years. I knew the exact calm, gentle way it went down at the end of a sentence. I knew how it said sweetheart. I heard it every time a door clicked shut behind me.

At two in the morning, I did something I'd never done in my life.

I asked for help before I'd tried everything myself.

ME: He answered. Coming down?

STALKER: 30 sec.

He was on the front steps in twenty. I went down in my socks and his hoodie and sat next to him and handed him the phone, and he read the thread, and I watched his whole body go still in that way it did, like a wolf in long grass.

"You texted him," he said.

Yes.