No to all of those.
So what crime would she report? Being scared? Having a bad feeling?
They’d think she was wasting their time.
Unless...
A memory surfaced, distant and fragile. Nora was seven years old, sitting at the kitchen table while her dad talked on the phone, his police badge glinting on his belt. Her mom was making dinner, humming along to the radio.
Before the car accident. Before everything changed. Before she learned that safety was just an illusion that could be shattered in an instant.
Her dad had been a cop. A good one, from what little she remembered. He’d worked in Blackridge before they moved to Seattle for her mom’s job.
And he’d known people. Other cops. People who might actually listen.
Nora grabbed her phone and opened Google, searching for “Blackridge Police Department.”
Their website loaded—simple, professional. A list of officers with photos. She scrolled through, looking for anyone who seemed familiar, anyone her dad might have worked with twenty years ago.
Most were too young. But then she saw him.
Captain Darius Holloway, 58. The photo showed a Black man with gray at his temples and kind eyes. The bio said he’d been with Blackridge PD for thirty-five years.
He would have worked with her dad.
She kept scrolling. More officers. Younger. Then—
Detective Carson Black, 34.
Something about that name tugged at a distant memory. Black. Her dad had talked about the Blacks. A cop family. Something about a tragedy...
She couldn’t remember clearly. But Nora remembered her dad speaking about them with respect. With sadness.
If she was going to report this—if she was going to try to make someone believe her—maybe she should go to someone who’d known her dad. Someone who might give her the benefit of the doubt.
Nora looked at Carson Black’s photo. Handsome with dark hair, intense eyes, a jaw that looked like it had been carved from granite. He didn’t smile in the photo. Instead, he stared at the camera with an expression that said he’d seen too much and believed in very little.
A man who probably wouldn’t dismiss her fears as anxiety or paranoia.
A man who might actually listen.
She saved the website to her phone and set it on the coffee table.
Tomorrow. She’d go tomorrow. Tell him about the parking garage, about the open file on her laptop, about the feeling that had been growing for weeks now—the sensation of being watched, of her things being moved, of something being fundamentally wrong, even though she couldn’t prove it.
And if he didn’t believe her?
Then at least she’d tried. At least she’d done something instead of hiding in her apartment, checking locks, and waiting for something bad to happen.
Because something bad was going to happen. She could feel it in her bones, the same way she’d felt it the morning of her parents’ accident when her mom had kissed her forehead and she’d wanted to beg her not to go.
Her instincts had been right then.
They were right now.
She just had to make someone believe her.
Outside, the dark sedan was still parked across the street. Waiting.
