The email arrives at 8:14 on a Sunday morning, from an address with a cupcake in the logo, and it takes four sentences to fire me.

We've decided to go another direction with our packaging refresh. We appreciate the mockups you provided and wish you the best in your future endeavors.

Future endeavors. Like I'm retiring. Like there's a gold watch coming.

I sit on the floor mattress with my laptop balanced on a milk crate and do the math on the back of a rent envelope, because that's apparently a genre now, me and envelopes, me and a ballpoint pen working out exactly how fucked I am in numbers small enough to fit in the margin. Rent. Phone bill, the one Trevor used to pay half of and I have paid alone for three years and nine months. The minimum on the card. The dentist thing I've been putting off since March that isn't optional anymore, not with the way the back left molar's started singing.

$340.

I write it down, underline it twice, and then sit there looking at the number like it might apologize.

Two clients gone in nineteen days. The Fall River olive-branch labels, gutted for an in-house cousin with a free design degree. Now the bakery, which I'd have sworn was solid, which sent me a moodboard of "warm, artisanal, a little bit grandma" not three weeks ago. Gone. Another direction. I want to ask what direction, exactly, because from where I'm sitting there's only one direction left, and it's down.

My phone rings at 9:40. Not the cheap one — that one sits on the windowsill, screen dark, one number in it, waiting like a held breath. This is my real phone, and the screen says MOM, and I answer because not answering costs more later, in ways I've learned to price out.

"You didn't call me back Thursday," Carmela says, no hello, the sound of a washing machine somewhere behind her, industrial, the hospital laundry hum she's had in her ears since before I was born. "I left a message."

"I've been busy, Ma."

"Busy." A pause weighted like she's folding something, snapping it flat. "Ellen at work says her daughter's doing the meal kits now, the ones that come in the box, forty dollars a week, you get real vegetables. You eating vegetables?"

"I'm eating."

"You sound thin on the phone. You can hear it, thin voices." She moves on before I can answer that, the way she always does, one grievance loading behind the last like a belt on a conveyor. "And the heat bill's going to be a nightmare this year, National Grid sent something in July already warning everybody, so don't let that boiler run all night like you do."

"I don't run it all night."

"You ran it all night in February."

I press two fingers into my left eyebrow and look at the ceiling stain that might be Florida or might be a fist, and wait, because I already know where this is going, I can feel the shape of it coming down the pipe before the water even hits.

"You know Trevor called me," she says.

There it is.

"Ma."

"He's doing so well, Maya. Big job now, government, I always said that boy had ambition, not like—" she catches herself, doesn't finish it, doesn't need to. "He asked about you so nice. Not pushy. Just, how's she doing, is she happy, does she need anything. That's not a man holding a grudge, that's a man who still cares."

My stomach does the thing it does, the elevator with the cable cut, and I have to put my hand flat against the cold plaster wall to check the room is still load-bearing before I can answer her.

"When did he call you," I say. My voice comes out too even. I hear the evenness and know she'll hear it too, eventually, the way she hears everything eventually, six months late and sideways.

"Couple weeks ago. Maybe three. I don't keep a diary, Maya, I'm not you."

Three weeks ago is before the steps. Before the coffee he set down when I wouldn't take it. Three weeks ago means he'd already gotten to her before he ever got to me, which means the machine — I don't have a better word for it, not yet, not this early on a Sunday — the machine reached my mother's kitchen before it reached my own front steps, and I am standing here with my palm flat against a wall trying to work out how many rooms of my life he's already been let into that I don't know about.

"Don't give him anything else," I say. "Don't give him my number, don't give him anything."

"He already has your number, Maya, he's not a stranger, he lived with you for—"

"Ma."

Something in my voice stops her. A small, rare victory. She says, quieter, almost hurt, "I just think it's nice somebody still asks."

I tell her I have to go. I don't tell her why. I hang up and sit very still on the mattress for a while with the rent envelope in my lap, $340 circled twice, and I think about the specific, surgical cruelty of a man who can make even my own mother into a delivery system.

---

I go out to walk it off, because that's the only free thing left to me, walking, and Providence in early October still has enough gold left in the light that it feels like a lie about the coming winter.

I head toward Atwells without deciding to, the way water finds the low point in a floor, and I'm three blocks from Doyle when I clock the sedan.

Grey. Parked at the corner of my own street, engine idling, exhaust ghosting up thin in the cold morning air. I don't look at it directly — I've learned that much, at least, four weeks of this and I've learned to look at storefronts, at my own shoes, at anything that isn't the car — and I keep walking, and at the next corner, four blocks up, past the bakery that isn't my bakery anymore, it's there again.

Same grey. Same idle hum.

The sidewalk does something strange under me, a half-degree tilt that has nothing to do with the actual pitch of the concrete, the kind of dizziness you get standing up too fast except I'm not standing up, I'm just standing, rooted, watching a parked car be somewhere it shouldn't have had time to be.

Uno, I think, the old habit, my father's habit, counting exits the way he taught me in restaurants before I was old enough to need it. Due.

I lose the count at three. I always lose it at three when I'm frightened. It's infuriating, how reliable that is.

I test it the way four years with Trevor taught me, because if nothing else, that relationship left me with a diagnostic. Three left turns in a row. Left onto Sutton, left onto a dead-end court I know from painting a job here two summers ago, a cul-de-sac with six identical triple-deckers and nowhere to go but back out the way I came, and then left again, doubling back onto Atwells like I never left.

The grey sedan follows the first turn.

It follows the second, hanging back half a block, patient, unbothered.

On the third — the dead end, the impossible turn, the one that should have told any rational driver this woman is testing you — it should have peeled off. A stranger with nowhere real to go doesn't drive into a cul-de-sac behind someone. But it does. It noses in almost to the end before some instinct in the driver kicks in, and then it's reversing, badly, too fast, a three-point turn that clips the curb, and it's gone before I make it back out onto the avenue.

Confirmed. Twice. My chest does something that isn't quite relief and isn't quite dread, some third thing that doesn't have a name yet.

I duck into the hardware store on Atwells because it has a window, because the light inside is fluorescent and flat and makes me feel less like I'm hallucinating my own life, and I stand by a rack of caulk guns and watch the street for eleven minutes.

That's when I see the second car.

Not the sedan. A Lincoln, dark, parked half a block down with its engine off — off, not idling, which is its own kind of tell — and a man behind the wheel who is not looking at his phone. That's the detail that snags me hardest, harder than the car itself: every person I have ever watched wait anywhere in this city checks a phone. This man sits with both hands loosely on the wheel at ten and two like he's driving somewhere, except he isn't going anywhere at all.

Two cars. Two watchers. My own street has apparently become a parking lot for men who are paid, in one currency or another, to know where I am.

I sit down on the low stone wall outside the hardware store, next to a dying window box of somebody's marigolds, and I shake.

It isn't dramatic. Nobody on the sidewalk looks twice. It's just my hands, a fine, continuous tremor, and my feet cramped hard inside my shoes, toes curling against the leather like they're trying to leave through the soles, and I sit there trying to work out if this is a panic attack or an accurate response to the actual facts of my actual life, and about halfway through the shaking I understand that the distinction doesn't matter anymore. Both things can be true. My body doesn't file it under two headings. It just registers threat, threat, threat and lets the rest sort itself out later, in some office with better lighting than the inside of my skull.

I take the cheap phone out of my coat pocket.

I haven't called it before. I've only ever answered it. Some part of me expected it to only work one direction, like the rule was built into the plastic itself, but it rings on my end same as any phone, three tones, and he picks up before the second one finishes.

"Where are you." Not hello. Not even alarm, exactly. Just the flat administrative tone of a man opening a ledger.

"Atwells. Outside the hardware store." My voice comes out thinner than I want it to. "There are two cars."

A pause, brief, recalibrating. "Describe them."

"Grey sedan, I've seen it a dozen times, it followed me through three turns including a dead end it had no business going into. And a dark Lincoln, half a block down, engine off, guy in it not on his phone."

"Plate on the Lincoln."

I squint down the street, feeling stupid, feeling like a woman playing a spy in a movie she wasn't cast for. "I can only see four digits. Six-two-four-something."

Silence on the line, but not empty silence — I can hear him thinking, actually hear the specific quality of it, the way you can hear a person go still even over a phone.

"Six-two-four-J," he says. Not a question.

"How do you—"

"The Lincoln is mine." He says it the way he says everything, without inflection, a fact laid flat on a table. "Since Thursday. Since Florida."

I sit very still on the wall.

"You put a man on me and didn't tell me."

"I'm telling you now."

"That's not the same thing, Dominic, that's not—" I stop myself, because I hear how close I am to the exact sentence I said to him three days ago at his table, that's what he did, and I don't want to hand him that weapon twice in one week, even against himself. "You don't get to just do that. Not without asking."

"I didn't ask you before I put a man in your stairwell either." No apology in it. Just an accounting of prior facts, the same way he laid out my rent and my client's name and my mother's hydrangea weeks before he'd earned the right to know any of it. "You want me to take him off."

I think about it. I actually think about it, sitting there shaking on a stone wall with a dying window box of marigolds beside me, and the honest answer arrives before I can dress it up in anything better.

"No," I say.

"Tell me about the sedan again."

I do — the three turns, the dead end, the badly executed three-point reverse — and something in his silence changes on the other end, cools by a few degrees, the quality of his attention narrowing in a way I can feel even through a cheap phone speaker.

"Stay where you are," he says. "Somebody's coming."

The Lincoln pulls up to the curb four minutes later. The driver doesn't introduce himself. He's maybe forty, thick through the shoulders, wearing a Members Only jacket that's probably older than I am, and he says nothing at all, just tilts his head toward the passenger door like the whole transaction is beneath conversation. I get in because my legs are still doing something unreliable and because the alternative is standing on Atwells Avenue being triangulated by two men in two cars, and at least one of them, apparently, works for me now, in some sense I haven't fully priced yet.

He drives me to the grocery store on Manton. Waits in the lot, engine off, hands at ten and two, while I buy groceries I can't really afford with money I don't really have, milk and eggs and the cheap pasta and a box of tea bags because it was on sale, and he doesn't offer to carry the bags but he does open the trunk without being asked, and he drives me home, and he waits at the curb until I'm inside the building before he pulls away.

I put the groceries away in my kitchen with the bathtub in it, milk in the little fridge, eggs on the shelf, and I find myself at the window checking the new latch — the one Dominic had fixed without asking, weeks ago now, the one I never once thanked anyone for — and there's a small, ugly gladness in my chest when it clicks shut solid under my hand.

I hate how glad I am. That's the part that actually frightens me, more than the sedan, more than the Lincoln, more than the four digits I still don't fully understand: not that I'm being watched, but that some starved, cornered animal part of me has already sorted the watchers into bad and mine, and is grateful for the second column.

---

I take the rent envelope back out. Rewrite the $340 in the corner, where it's still true, where nothing about tonight has fixed a single thing about November.

Underneath it I write two headers.

WHO KNOWS WHERE I AM.

I fill it fast: Dominic. Bruno. Simone. My mother. Trevor. Whoever Trevor's told, which I have no way of counting, which might as well be a number with no top on it.

Six, if I round generously.

WHY.

I sit with the pen over the paper for a long time. The kitchen radiator ticks once, cooling. Somewhere outside a car door closes, and I don't flinch, which frightens me more than flinching would have.

I don't write anything under the second header. I can't. Every answer I try — because he loves me, because he wants to keep me, because I'm useful, because I'm a liability, because I'm a story he's telling himself about being a different kind of man than his father — collapses the second I look straight at it, the way a word does if you stare at it too long and it stops looking like a real word at all.

I leave it blank and fold the envelope in half.

---

At dusk I go back out. I tell myself it's for air. It isn't; I know exactly what I'm doing, walking the length of Doyle Avenue in the failing light like I'm daring the evidence to show itself again, and it does, because it always does, because that's the whole design of the thing.

The grey sedan is parked under the dead streetlight two doors down — the one that's been out since before I moved in, the bulb nobody's ever replaced, so the car sits in a pool of its own particular dark.

This time I don't test it. I don't turn three times or duck into a store. I walk straight toward it, my sneakers loud on the pavement in the cold, my breath showing, and I get close enough — close enough that the tilt in the sidewalk finally steadies, close enough that whatever was vertigo an hour ago resolves itself into plain, flat, unbearable clarity — to see the little sun-faded barcode sticker still on the corner of the windshield, rental company, never scraped off, and the pale hand resting on the wheel, and on the wrist of that hand, lit blue for half a second as he checks it without looking away from me, a Fitbit.

He doesn't drive off.

He lifts the paper coffee cup an inch off the dash, toward me, a small, unhurried gesture, almost polite, the gesture of a man raising a glass at a party he was always going to be invited to.

He isn't hiding anymore.