"Few weeks. Maybe longer." I wrap my hands around my coffee cup. "It's probably nothing. Just a feeling."
"Feelings like that usually mean something." She leans back, studying me. "You see anyone? Same person, same vehicle?"
The dark SUV flashes through my mind—black or maybe dark blue, tinted windows, expensive-looking. I've seen it on my street multiple times recently, always parked in different spots. Different enough that it could be a coincidence. Close enough that my gut tells me it's not.
"Maybe," I say. "There's this SUV I keep seeing. But it could be nothing. This is New York."
"Or it could be something." Jen pulls out her phone. "You need to start documenting. Every time you see it, you note the time, the location, the plate number if you can get it. You feel watched, you write it down. Someone follows you, you call the cops."
"I don't want to be that person. The paranoid woman who calls the cops because she feels weird."
"Better paranoid than dead." Her voice is flat, matter-of-fact. "Trust your gut, Frankie. If something feels wrong, it probably is."
Jen leaves, and I'm alone with my coffee and the voice in my head that's been screaming at me for weeks that something is very, very wrong.
The rest of the shift blurs. A broken arm on a kid who fell off a skateboard—I make him laugh while we set it because fear makes the pain worse. Another heart attack—this time on an elderly woman who grips my hand the whole way to the cath lab because she's alone and terrified and thinks she's dying.
A drunk driver with minor injuries who spends an hour screaming at everyone before security drags him out. An overdose who crashes and comes back and crashes again, and we pump her full of Narcan until she's vomiting on the floor and crying because we saved her when she didn't want to be saved.
This is my life. Blood and fear and the constant knowledge that I can't save everyone. That sometimes all I can do is hold someone's hand while they die and bag their personal effects before moving on to the next patient.
When my shift ends, I'm dead on my feet. My back aches. My feet are screaming. There's a pulled muscle in my shoulder from lifting patients, and I smell like antiseptic and blood and a full day of other people's emergencies.
I change back into my street clothes in the locker room, moving on autopilot. My jeans, my sweater, my winter coat. Theroutine is so familiar I don't even think about it. I shove my scrubs in the hospital laundry bin and grab my bag, and the whole time my mind is still back in the trauma bay, still feeling David's hand going limp in mine.
The winter dark has already settled over the city. The cold hits my face when I step outside, sharp enough to sting. I should take the bus, but the bus means waiting, and waiting means standing still, and standing still means thinking about David's hand going limp and his mother's screams and Vincent's face the last time I saw him alive.
So I walk.
The bodega on the corner is bright and warm and smells like coffee and cleaning products. I grab a protein bar and pay in cash. The bar tastes like cardboard, but I force it down because I haven't eaten since breakfast and my hands are starting to shake.
The streets are busy enough—people heading home from work, tourists wandering between restaurants. I keep my head down and my pace steady. Just another exhausted woman in a winter coat, invisible in the Manhattan night.
That's when I feel it... someone's watching me.
My shoulders tense, and the hair on the back of my neck stands up. It's the same feeling I get in the ER right before a patient crashes—that split-second awareness that something is about to go very wrong.
I risk a glance over my shoulder. I see nothing. Just other people on the street, none of them looking at me.
But the feeling doesn't go away.
I've felt it for weeks now. The awareness that I'm being watched. The sense that someone is always just out of sight, tracking my movements. The dark SUV that's always on my street no matter what time I come home. I told myself I wasbeing paranoid, that this was just the normal anxiety of living in a city where bad things happen to good people.
But my gut knows better.
I cut through the Village, taking the shortcut that saves me time. The streets are narrower here, quieter, with fewer people and more shadows. The buildings lean in close, and the sounds of the city feel muffled, like I've stepped into a pocket of silence where something bad is waiting to happen.
I hear footsteps behind me.
My heart kicks up, adrenaline flooding my system. I tell myself it's nothing, just another person walking home, but the footsteps match my pace too perfectly. When I speed up, they speed up. When I slow down, they slow down.
Someone is definitely following me.
My hand tightens on my bag strap, and I catalogue my options. My keys between my fingers. A heavy flashlight in my purse. My phone ready to dial 911. I took the hospital's self-defense class, learned where to strike if someone grabs me—SING: solar plexus, instep, nose, groin. Then scream fire and run like hell.
I'm on MacDougal Street now, almost to the intersection with West Third. Just a few more blocks and I'll be back on Ninth Avenue where there are lights and people and safety. I can see the intersection ahead, the wash of yellow from the streetlights, the shapes of pedestrians on the busier street.
The footsteps behind me get closer.
