"Say it again."
"The mother of my child."
She closes her eyes. Opens them. The mascara situation is genuinely catastrophic at this point and she is the most extraordinary thing I have ever been responsible for.
"My dad is going to kill you," she says.
"Probably."
"I'm serious. He's going to actually kill you. With his hands."
"Your dad doesn't have my training." It’s almost a joke. Almost.
She pulls back. Looks up at me. Her face is wrecked and beautiful and certain.
The mother of my child.
21
Declan
The call comes at six in the morning.
I'm already awake. Since four. She's asleep next to me, face toward the window, one hand on her stomach. She's been doing that in her sleep for three days without realizing it.
My phone vibrates on the nightstand. I pick it up before the second buzz.
"We've got him," James, my security leader, says.
I sit up. Move to the hallway. Close the bedroom door behind me.
"Name."
James gives me the name and the brief. I don't recognize it. Local. Thirty-one years old. IT support. Apartment eight minutes from her building. Eight minutes. He has been living eight minutes from her for the entire time she's been streaming and I have been sitting in this house building a file while thisman walked to her street and looked up at her windows and wrote down what the light looked like.
She's pregnant.
She is asleep in my bed carrying my child and this man threatened her.
"Declan."
"I'm here."
"There's no evidence of attempted entry. No escalation to physical contact. The behavioral profile is consistent with fixation, not immediate threat. He's a watcher. He builds patterns. He hasn't crossed to contact beyond the messages."
"Yet."
"Yet." James pauses. "We can have the restraining order paperwork ready by end of day. We'll need her address of record."
"My address."
A beat. James is a professional. He doesn't ask. "Your address. Understood."
I end the call. I stand in the hallway. My house. My hallway. The bedroom door closed behind me with Billie asleep on the other side and my child inside her and a man named — I have his name now, I have his full name and his address and his workplace and every account he's ever created — has been standing eight minutes from her building mapping her life.
My hands are fists.
I have done this work for twenty years. I have handled fixation cases. Stalking cases. Cases where it went further than this, where the watcher crossed to contact, where I walked into the aftermath and documented it and moved on. I have always been the calm one. The professional. The man whose hands are steady.
