She grabbed her laptop bag and limped to the stairwell, not caring about the broken heel, just needing to get out, get somewhere safe, somewhere with light and people.
The stairwell was better—bright fluorescent lights, her footsteps echoing off the walls as she half-ran, half-stumbled up six flights. By the time Nora burst out onto the street level, her lungs burned and her legs felt like jelly.
The sidewalk. Streetlights. A couple walking their dog on the other side of the street.
Normal. Safe.
She called an Uber with shaking fingers, then stood under a street lamp, every nerve on high alert, until the car arrived. She gave her address and spent the entire ride checking over her shoulder, making sure no dark sedan followed them.
***
Nora’s apartment building looked like a sanctuary when the driver pulled up. She thanked them andhurried inside, nodding to the night security guard—Eugene, she think his name was—without making eye contact.
She didn’t relax until she was inside her apartment with the door locked, deadbolt thrown, and chain engaged.
Then she stood there in the dark for a long moment, just breathing.
You’re safe. You’re home. Nothing happened. You’re okay.
But she didn’t feel okay.
She flipped on every light in the apartment—living room, kitchen, bedroom, bathroom—until the whole place blazed like a beacon. Only then did Nora dare to move away from the door.
Her hands still shook as she kicked off the ruined heels and peeled off her torn tights. The scrapes on her palms and knees looked worse under the harsh bathroom light—raw and angry, bits of gravel embedded in the skin.
She cleaned them mechanically, movements automatic from years of patching herself up after playground fights and falls when she was a kid bouncing between homes. No one coming to kiss it better. No one to tell her it would be okay.
Stop it. You’re not that kid anymore.
But standing there in her bathroom at twenty-nine years old, she felt exactly like that kid. Small. Scared. Alone.
And worst of all—not believed.
Because that’s what would happen if Nora told anyone about tonight, wasn’t it? Lila would say she was overreacting. Her therapist would say it was her anxiety talking. They’d say she was imagining things, seeing threats where there weren’t any, letting her traumatic childhood make her paranoid about normal situations.
They always did.
She thought about the time she’d told my third foster mother that something felt wrong about the way her boyfriend looked at her. She’d called Nora a liar and sent her back to the agency.
Or when she’d told her high school counselor that the janitor gave her a bad feeling and she thought he might be following her. She’d said Nora was being dramatic and attention-seeking.
Turned out he’d been arrested six months later for stalking a student at another school. But by then, Nora had already learned the lesson: no one believes you.
She walked back to her bedroom and changed into soft pajama pants and an old college sweatshirt. Comfort clothes. Then she stood at her bedroom window, looking down at the street below.
A dark car was parked across the street.
Her heart stopped.
Same make as the one in the garage? She couldn’t tell in the dark. There were thousands of dark sedans in Blackridge.
You’re being paranoid.
She watched for five minutes. Ten. The car didn’t move. No one got out.
Maybe it belonged to someone in the building across the street. Maybe she was losing her mind.
Nora forced herself to walk away from the window, to go to the kitchen and make chamomile tea like her therapist had suggested for anxiety. The ritual of it—boiling water, steeping the tea bag, adding honey—usually calmed her.
