"I promise."
"And if anything happens—if anyone bothers you, or threatens you, or makes you feel unsafe in any way—you'll tell me. Immediately. No matter what."
The dahlia gleams on my table. His voice echoes in my head.
"I will, Mom. I promise."
We talk for a few more minutes—small things, safe things, the weather and her garden and the neighbor's dog that won't stop barking. Normal mother-daughter conversation, as if everything isn't falling apart.
After I hang up, I sit in the gathering dusk and think about what she said.
I've seen it before. You get too close to people like that, and they'll swallow you whole.
What has she seen? When? Where?
My mother has always been afraid—of strangers, of change, of anything that disrupts the small, careful life she's built. I always assumed it was anxiety, maybe trauma from something in her past that she didn't want to discuss.
But what if it's more than that? What if her fear isn't irrational at all?
I look around my apartment—the barricaded door, the drawn curtains, the uneaten food on the counter. I think about the lost flowers, the canceled client, the phone call in the dark.
I'm becoming her. Hiding behind locked doors, jumping at shadows, letting fear shrink my world until there's nothing left but four walls and a racing heart.
Is that what he wants? To turn me into a prisoner in my own life? To isolate me so completely that he becomes the only thing left?
The thought sparks something in my chest. Not hope—I'm too tired for hope. But something adjacent to it. A stubbornness. A refusal.
I can't keep living like this. I can't keep hiding, waiting, letting him dismantle my life piece by piece while I cower in my apartment.
I have to do something.
I don't know what yet. Confronting him seems suicidal. Running seems pointless—he has resources I can't imagine, connections I can't escape. Going to the police still feels futile, a child's solution to an adult nightmare.
But there has to besomething. Some move I can make, some leverage I can find, some way to stop being prey.
I stand up from the couch, legs stiff, and walk to the kitchen table. The dahlia sits in its glass of water, petals dark and perfect.
I should throw it away. It's his mark on my life, his claim on my space, and keeping it makes me complicit somehow.
But I don't throw it away.
Instead, I stand there looking at it, this beautiful dying thing that a monster left on my doorstep, and I make myself a promise.
I will not let him swallow me whole.
I don't know how to fight him yet. But I will figure it out.
And when I do, he's going to learn that I'm not as easy to break as he thinks.
Chapter 8 - Gabriel
Hutton's report arrives at noon, delivered in his usual clipped, efficient manner.
"The Patterson client canceled this morning, sir. The florist received the call around ten. She hasn't left the apartment since."
I set down my coffee and lean back in my chair, savoring the information like a fine wine. "Her reaction?"
"Difficult to assess without interior surveillance. But she hasn't opened the curtains or moved the barricade from her door. Building cameras show no activity in the hallway outside her unit."
