“Sunscreen is stupid,” Gracie yells back, which sends her and her new friend into another round of giggles.
Whatever.Meera will lecture her daughter about the use of the wordstupidagain later. Right now, she just wants to sit in her car, blast the AC for five minutes, and then get through the rest of this playground visit like the dutiful caretaker she is.
In the car, Meera reclines her seat all the way back. Gracie will be eight years old in a month; she’s old enough now that Meera doesn’t always need to watch her to know she’s okay. Even after bringing her car to the shop, the AC still makes an annoying rattling sound, but it feels so good that Meera doesn’t mind. She’ll just sit here for a moment or two, or at least until she’s no longer actively sweating. Gracie won’t miss her.
With her few minutes of peace, Meera returns to her current project: trying to figure out the identity of LivingstonTheDream from Reddit, who sent her the message about Townsend’s potentially fishy company. Based on the other subreddit pages contributed to by the mystery user (r/Yale, r/VentureCapital, and r/MaleEquestrian), as well as the username itself, Meera has decided that LivingstonTheDream is most likely Orson Livingston: graduate of Yale University, vice president at Silicon Hills Venture Partners, and—according to his bio on the company website—avid horse rider. But she’s not 100 percent certain, especially after discovering that Orson graduated from the same school as Townsend just a few years earlier. Why would he out a former classmate on such a public forum? Weren’t these cis white men with trust funds supposed to protect one another?
Today is not the day to make sense of this. It’s too damn hot, and Meera is too damn tired. She’s just closed her eyes when her phone vibrates on the center console. Maybe it’s Talia, finally explaining why she’s been holding Meera at arm’s length. Meera opens her messages and is confused to find—instead of a text from Talia—a snapshot of her daughter, ducking into a tunnel. It’s the kind of picture Hari would send her, along with the captionHaving tons of fun,just to rub in her face what a good dad he is. But Hari isn’t here. And the person who sent this picture isn’t saved in Meera’s contacts.
A short text message follows the picture:Probably shouldn’t leave your kid alone. You never know whose watching.
Who’s, not whose, Meera thinks. Then, just as quickly:Gracie.
She leaps from the car without turning it off, her heart pounding so loudly she can barely hear her flip-flops slapping on the red-hotasphalt of the parking lot. When she reaches the tunnels and turf hills, her daughter is nowhere to be seen, though she does see the little girl with the braids, collecting blades of grass.
“Where did your friend go?” Meera asks the girl. “The one with the ponytail and the pink Roblox T-shirt?” She feels like she’s giving a description to the police, and her eyes tear up involuntarily.
“I’m not supposed to talk to strangers,” the girl informs her.
“But I’m a mom.” The tears start to flow, and the girl skips off, no longer wanting to be part of this drama.
Frantically, Meera sprints from tunnel to tunnel, peeking in each tube and desperate to find her daughter’s face inside. But every tunnel she checks is empty, empty, empty. Meera is crying hard now, her shoulders shaking and vision blurred. Hari will never forgive her. She will never forgive herself. Her daughter is gone.
“Mom?” At the sound of Gracie’s voice, Meera turns—and there her daughter stands, head tilted to one side but totally unharmed. “Mom, why are you crying?”
“Oh, my God.” Meera runs and scoops her up, not caring that Gracie is almost eight and wriggling to get out of her grasp, too old for public hugs from her mother. All Meera cares about is the fact that her daughter is safe. Though apparently Meera isn’t as safe as she thought she was.
Meera waits until she’s driven Gracie home and plopped her in front of the TV before she calls Talia; she doesn’t want her daughter to hear what she’s going to say.
“I was just going to call you,” Talia answers. “I was thinking again about the Post-it Note in my bathroom and—”
Before Talia can finish, Meera chokes out a sob.
“Meer, what’s going on? Are you okay?”
Leaning against her kitchen wall, trying to keep her voice low, Meera quickly tells her friend about the park, the picture, the foreboding piece of advice. “I think it was Amanda,” she concludes. “I think she’s after me now too.”
Talia takes a moment to answer. “What makes you think that?”
“She spelled ‘who’s’ wrong. And who else could it be?”
“But why would she threaten you? How would she even know who you are?”
“I don’t know,” Meera says, louder than she intended, “but she is. Maybe she knows I pushed you to talk to the police. Or maybe she’s going after everyone in your orbit, just to fuck with you.” It pisses her off, really, that Talia seems almost skeptical, especially after everything Meera has done to protect her. She risked her job for Talia. And apparently she’s endangered her seven-year-old daughter in the process.
“That’s possible,” says Talia. Her voice sounds far away, already distracted by another matter.
Before she can say something that she’ll regret, Meera wraps up the call and collapses at her kitchen table. Amanda isn’t just after Talia and Townsend anymore; it’s clear that Meera’s involvement has made her a target as well. And while Amanda could have easily figured out that Talia and Meera are friends (like she said, she’s always watching), Meera can’t help but think that she’s landed on Amanda’s radar for another reason. Perhaps Amanda knows something. Something that Talia doesn’t. Maybe she knows the truth about Meera’s history with Townsend.
It kills her to do this, but Meera has no choice: She needs to let Hari take Gracie, at least until she feels she’s safe again.
“You really can’t tell me what’s going on?” Hari asks, not for the first time. They stand in his kitchen, where Gracie cannot hear them over the sound of the music in her bedroom. Meera recognizes the song—it’s from theWickedsoundtrack, Gracie’s favorite. Her eyes well up at the thought of leaving her here and going home alone. It’s the best solution, but it still feels wrong.
“It’s nothing,” Meera says. “It’s just something I have going on for work.”
Hari looks at her, and because they were together for over a decade, Meera knows just what he’s thinking:I don’t believe you. And he shouldn’t believe her either. Because it’s not nothing.
In the two days that have passed since the incident at the park, Meera has received another three messages from the number she’s convinced belongs to Amanda, each one more menacing than the last. The first one, after a trip to the grocery store:That’s a lot of wine. Having a dinner party?The second one, late on Sunday evening:Don’t forget to turn off the kitchen light before you go to bed.And the last one, the one that made her decide Gracie wasn’t safe with her anymore: a picture of her daughter waiting at the school bus stop. No text accompanied the photo, and Meera found the silence even more terrifying than anything Amanda could have said.
