Forty seconds later it starts moving.
She's in it.
I put the phone face-down on the desk. Breathe out. Go back to the action plan.
My phone lights up two minutes later.
This uber smells like a pine tree. This is a criticism.
I look at it. The relief of it. The way she's already commenting. Her voice, even in text, doing the thing it always does.
I type:Noted.
16
Billie
Declane sets a case folder down in front of me on the kitchen table between us like it's evidence, which I suppose it is, and he opens it to the first page and turns it toward me and I look at it. Timestamps. Account IDs. Cached messages, screenshots, metadata analysis. The kind of documentation that only comes from someone who has been building a file at speed with the thoroughness of a man who does this for a living.
I knew about the comment with my name. I knew about the message describing my street.
I did not know about the messages before those. I did not know about the IP analysis or the account creation patterns or the cross-referencing with other platforms. I did not know that the person who wrote my name in my chat has also been leaving comments on my Instagram under a different handle for three months, or that there's a pattern to the timing that suggests hewatches from a consistent location, or that the location is within walking distance of my building.
Three months. He's been at this for three months. I thought the name comment was the beginning. It wasn't even close.
I go quiet.
This is not a thing I do. I have a voice for every situation. I have a joke for every situation. I have been talking my way through uncomfortable moments since I was old enough to realize that funny people get left alone, and right now I have nothing. My mouth is closed and my brain is closed and I am looking at eight pages of a man I don't know who has been building a picture of me the way Declan builds pictures of me, except the picture is wrong and the building is wrong and the man is wrong and he lives close enough to walk to my apartment.
"Why didn't you tell me?" Declan asks.
He's standing across the table from me. Not sitting. The posture of a man who sat down, saw what the conversation was going to be, and stood back up.
"I handled it," I say.
"Billie."
"This crap is normal for girl streamers,” I admit. “I flagged the accounts. I documented the pattern. I have a system, I've had a system for eighteen months, and it works, and I handled it."
"You handled the two you knew about." He's not raising his voice. He's not doing the careful-choosing-words thing from the argument about the private tier. This is something else. This is the flat, even register of a man who is trying very hard not to be frightened in front of me.
"Why didn't you tell me," he tries again.
I should have a smart answer. I should have something wry and self-deprecating about my instinct for independence or my allergy to asking for help or the fact that I have been managing my own problems since I was sixteen years old and my momdied and I watched my dad fall apart and decided somebody in this family was going to hold it together.
What comes out is: "Because I didn't want you to look at me like I couldn't handle it."
He's quiet for a moment.
"I'm not looking at you like that," he says.
He isn't. I check. His face is not pity, not condescension, not the face of a man who thinks I'm fragile. It's the face of a man who is angry about a situation and concerned about a person and completely unsurprised that she handled it alone because he knows her well enough to know that's what she does.
"I started the file when I pulled the deleted comment. Few days ago." He looks at the folder. "But the activity goes back months. The Instagram accounts, the timing patterns. He's been watching you since before I knew you were BrattyBaby."
"Months." I look at the folder. "He's been doing this for months."
"The accounts were separate. Different platforms, different handles. It took cross-referencing to see the pattern."
