I step back from the glass instinctively, into the dark of the kitchen, light off. He can't see me from the street. I'm in shadow and the angles don't work.
But I can see him.
His car is at the curb. Not pulled fully to the side the way you park when you're just parking, but angled. Pointed. I've watched enough crime documentaries to know what deliberate positioning looks like and this is it: a man who has placed himself where he has line of sight to a window, and the window is mine, and he is sitting in his car at seven forty-five in the morning on my street looking up at my building.
I stand in my kitchen and watch him.
I would like to report that I find this alarming, or at minimum odd, but I don't. A forty-eight-year-old security professional in a sensible dark car having some kind of private moment while aimed at my window is a lot of things. It is both devastating and slightly absurd. It is the most Declan Maguire thing I haveever witnessed, and I have witnessed quite a bit over twenty-one years, including the time he showed up to my middle school play in a full suit because he thought it was a formal event. He sat in the front row. He was the only person in a tie. He watched the entire production ofGreasewithout changing expression and then told me I had good stage presence.
There's an admin side to streaming that nobody tells you about when you get into it. The numbers are always there. Subscriber counts, viewer tallies, dollar amounts, tier breakdowns. All just data, neutral, and you learn quickly not to attach too much to any individual number. Numbers go up, numbers go down. That's the nature of content. That's fine.
I've been doing this for eighteen months and I'm very rational about the numbers.
Here's what I'm not going to say out loud and what I know anyway: I don't know what BrattyBaby is without DarkWatcher watching. That's not a tragedy. That's not even a crisis. It's just a question I don't have the answer to yet, sitting quietly in my chest next to all the other things that changed last night.
I've been performing a version of myself on camera for eighteen months and for the last seven of those months I've known exactly who was on the other side of the screen. I aimed my content at him. I calibrated my voice for him. I learned his response patterns and his timing and the rhythm of his attention. And now he's not there, and I'm supposed to go live, and I don't know who I'm performing for anymore. Or whether performing is still the right word for what I do.
10
Declan
Icall her.
"Hey." Her voice. The real one. The one I can no longer pretend I don't know how to find.
"I need to come over," I say. "We should talk."
A pause. Not surprised. "Okay."
"I'll be there in twenty minutes."
"Okay," she says again, and there's a quality to it. Not this morning'sokay,the one carrying four things at once. This one is waiting. She knows what this call is.
It takes me nineteen minutes. I don't examine this.
She opens the door before I knock. Same as last time. As if she hears me coming up the stairs before I've made any sound.
Oversized shirt. Bare feet. Hair up in the inexact way she wears it when she isn't performing for anyone. She steps back and lets me in without ceremony.
"Coffee?" she says.
"No."
She doesn't push it. Sits on the arm of the couch and watches me cross to the window. I need something to look at that isn't her. The street below. Late afternoon. The neighborhood going about its business.
I turn. She's watching me with the look she gets when she's running her own read on a situation. Patient. Precise. I've seen it across dinner tables for years. I understand it differently now.
"I came here to stop this," I say.
She waits.
"I've been telling myself that for two days." I stop. "I drove over here to say it out loud and I can't make myself mean it. That's the problem."
She's quiet for a moment. Then she uncrosses her legs and stands up. Crosses the room in a few steps. Unhurried. No drama. She puts her hand flat on my chest, just that, just her palm over my sternum, and looks up at me.
"Declan."
"Billie—"
