Stefan: I just realised how stupid this all is! They want you home, but they’ve just taken away your means of booking a flight!
Stefan: Fuck I hate our family sometimes
Stefan: Tell me the date you complete your degree, and I’ll look up some flights. My treat
Ice flooded my veins, stealing away any lingering wellbeing I’d been feeling from my intense orgasm. I couldn’t afford to have a firm date set on my return yet—not before I knew that my visa was secured and they couldn’t get me deported.
Ri: I have no idea yet. Exam dates haven’t been announced. I’ll keep you posted as soon as I have more information
Stefan: You must have some idea of when the semester ends, though. Just give me the first date of the semester break, and I’ll look from that date onwards
I shoved my phone under my pillow, breathing hard. Every message from him felt like a nail in my coffin. I knew he thought he was helping, and he didn’t know that I had no intentions of returning to the fate I’d been forced into. But lately, his questions had started to feel more and more like demands. Like suspicion.
How much could I really trust Stefan? I hadn’t seen him or spoken to him much in the four years I’d been in Australia, and who knew how far he’d been drawn into my uncle’s sordid web?
I couldn’t trust anyone from home.
On shaky legs I got up to close my curtains. The night was unseasonably arctic for April, and I pressed my cheek against the glass, hoping the cold would freeze out some of the worries cramming my head.
Something moved, down on the street, in the shadows just outside the glowing circle of the streetlight. I squinted into the dark, wondering if it was that feral cat that I’d caught digging in the communal garbage bins earlier in the year. The thing had looked pregnant, maybe it had babies now.
No … the shape in the shadows was too big to be a cat. And when it shifted again, stepping slightly into the light, I realised that it was a man. A thickset man wearing a baseball cap. I stepped back hurriedly, my heart in my throat, my mind instantly going back two weeks to that man at the bus stop on the morning of my wedding.
It can’t be him. It’s just a coincidence, I reasoned. Loads of men wore baseball caps. He was probably waiting for an Uber or something. That was the most rational explanation.
Still, I moved around my bed, turning off the lamp and dousing the room in darkness. Creeping back to the window, I peered out again. My view of the street was better without the light from my room reflecting on the glass.
He was still there, huddled in a thick parka. He wasn’t watching mywindow, but scanning the street, and as I spied on him, a car pulled up to the curb.
See?It’s just an Uber …
But I knew that car. And it wasn’t an Uber.
Not unless things had turned around so completely for Rumi in the last few weeks that she’d started offering ride shares in her Maserati.
Rumi was clearly still stalking my apartment.
She switched the headlights off, and the man opened the passenger door and climbed into the car. I barely breathed for interminable moments as they sat there, in the darkness, outside my apartment, doing God knew what.
I gripped the windowsill with clammy palms, waiting. And waiting. Finally, the guy climbed out of the car, and Rumi crawled off down the street, her headlights still off. My attention slid reluctantly back to the man as he tucked something inside his parka.
My stomach dropped. What had she given him—money? Was she paying some creep to watch my apartment? And if she was, would she be able to trace me back to Henry? And what would she do if—when—she found out about my marriage to him? She could ruin everything.
Nausea clawed its way up my throat, and I staggered to the bed and curled up on top of the covers, breathing through the rising urge to vomit. I hadn’t really worried about Rumi much after she’d stopped sending text messages, but that had been stupid and naïve … and potentially ruinous. How had I managed to forget that she was a controlling psychopath?
Shivering, I tugged back the comforter enough to tuck myself under it, huddling down until it covered me up to my nose. This was the way I’d always slept as a child. And always facing the door so that no one could ever surprise me by coming into my room while my back was turned.
I needed to tell Henry that Rumi was more of an issue than we thought. That we might need to bump her up a few places on his risk-assessment spreadsheet.
I needed to talk to Henry, to have him use that logical brain of his to figure out a way we could fix this.
I just … I needed Henry.
My phone buzzed under my pillow.La naiba, I didn’t want to look.
But what if it was Henry?
Swallowing down a sudden surge of hope, I tugged the phone out. A Tickle notification showed on my lock screen. Thank fuck it wasn’t Stefan. Opening the app, I almost cried when I saw I had a new message from M_Jay.
