Chapter 5. Under the Window

Wren POV

Tessa texted at nine.

TESSA: Staying at Dom's tonight!! Leftover pasta in the fridge. Lock up. Love you, little bird.

I typed back a heart and nothing else.

I didn't tell her I'd spent the afternoon in a clinic. I didn't tell her a doctor had used a word I'd never heard and looked at me like I should know it. I didn't tell her about the restroom door.

Secrets were easier when you didn't have a voice. Nobody expected you to explain.

Then I texted Juno, because she'd threatened to assume I was dead.

ME: Home. Alive. Thank you again.

JUNO: Good. Hydrate. If the hockey man shows up at your door, call me and I'll fight him.

JUNO: I will lose. But I'll be loud about it.

I almost smiled.

On my nightstand, two things sat side by side. Mom's white bottle of vitamins. And the little paper envelope Dr. Asher had pressed into my hand, with three more pale green tablets inside.

Every girl on this campus who needs them takes them.

I picked up the white bottle and turned it in the lamplight. I had swallowed one of these every morning for fourteen years. Mom always watched me do it.

Nobody had ever told me what was in them.

I put it down again, very carefully, as if it might break.

The apartment was very quiet without her. I could hear the fridge, the pipes, the old couple downstairs watching a game show. The streetlight outside my window buzzed on its pole, and somewhere past the last houses, the forest was breathing.

I sat on my bed with my knees pulled up, my phone in one hand and a notebook in the other.

When I was scared, I made lists. Lists were safe. Lists didn't look at you.

Who knew where I was today?

I wrote it out.

1. Juno. Found me in the restroom. Took me to the clinic.

2. Dr. Asher. Knew my name before I told her.

3. Silas.

I stared at the third name.

Silas, who'd been told to follow me. Who'd called me wolfless and mute across the quad like it was a diagnosis. Who'd snapped a pen in half when my fever hit and looked at me like I was on fire.

Who'd sent Juno to find me.

Who'd stood outside the restroom door.

Who'd walked me home, half a block behind, and never said a word.

I added a fourth line, because I liked to be thorough.

4. Whoever opened my window.

I looked at that line for a long time. Then, smaller, I wrote under it:

Unless it was me.

That one scared me most of all.

Because if the texter was Silas, then at least I knew his face. At least he was a person, a grumpy, rude, enormous person who'd carried my books up three flights of stairs. I could hate him. I could block him. I could report him.

But if it wasn't him, then someone else had been close enough to my window to watch it open. Someone else knew my schedule, my bullies, my bathroom stall.

And I'd spent two years trying to forget the last person who'd watched me that closely.

He'd watched me through a small glass square in a metal door. He'd watched me while a needle went into my arm and my blood went into a tube. He'd watched me while my bones broke.

I never saw him leave. I only remembered his shoes. And his voice. And a face that dissolved every time I tried to look at it, like a reflection in moving water.

What if he'd found me again?

What if he'd never stopped?

My hands were shaking. I pressed them flat against the notebook until they stopped.

Then my phone lit up.

UNKNOWN: Are you okay?

I read it four times.

Three words. Nothing else. No explanation, no threat. Just a question, the kind a person asks when they've been thinking about you all day.

Only three people knew I hadn't been okay.

I didn't answer right away. I made myself think, the way I always did, three steps ahead.

If I asked who he was, he wouldn't tell me. He'd already proved that.

If I blocked him, he'd still be out there, and I'd stop knowing what he knew.

If I called Tessa, she'd call Mom, and Mom would be in her car within the hour, and I would be home by morning with my door unlocked from the outside and my whole new life folded up and put back in a box.

No.

I'd fought too long to get here.

I got off the bed. I turned off my lamp first, so the room went dark and nobody outside could see me move. Then I crossed the floor in my socks and stood beside the window, just out of sight, my back against the wall.

The street below was empty. Parked cars. A recycling bin knocked over by the wind. The streetlight buzzing in its little circle of orange.

And past the circle, in the shadow of the old maple across the street, nothing.

I couldn't see anything.

But I could smell it, faint through the glass, and the thing under my skin went very, very still.

Woodsmoke.

Frost.

My heart was hammering so hard I could feel it in my teeth. I lifted my phone and, with one thumb, typed two words.

ME: Where are you?

I pressed send.

For one second, nothing happened.

Then, across the street, under the maple tree, a phone buzzed.

I heard it. Of course I heard it. I could hear everything. The soft double vibration, the rustle of fabric as a hand went into a pocket.

And then the screen lit up in the dark.

It lit up a face from below. He was standing exactly where the light didn't reach, looking down at the message I had just sent him.

He'd been standing there the whole time. Maybe the whole night. Maybe every night.

I didn't move. I didn't breathe.

He read the message. His thumb went still over the screen.

And then, slowly, he looked up.

Straight at my window. Straight at the dark spot where I was standing, where he shouldn't have been able to see me at all.

Our eyes met through the glass.

He didn't look away. He didn't run. He didn't even look surprised.

He looked like a man who'd just been caught, and had known all along that one day he would be.

My phone buzzed in my hand.

I knew that face.

My stalker had a name.

Silas Calder. And he'd carried my boxes up three flights of stairs.