When she’d said goodbye to New York, she’d expected—hoped—to be home long before now. The police couldn’t guarantee they could protect her, but they were hunting for her stalker. She’d believed it was only a matter of time. But with her in hiding, new leads had probably dried up fast.
An image of her mom and her brother back in New York City looking at the calendar together popped into her mind. Her mom would be frowning, a tightness to her jaw that Sabrina had seen in her childhood. Her brother would try to comfort her, try to hide his own anxiety. But they would both be wondering where Sabrina was, wondering if she was okay. Wondering if she was still alive.
She tried to suppress the instant mix of anger and sadness. She’d explained to her family what the PI she’d hired had told her: disappearing was the only way to ensure her safety—and theirs. She wouldn’t be able to contact them, and she couldn’t tell them where she was going.
They’d fought her on it, but it hadn’t mattered. She wasn’t going to let anyone else die because of her.
Tucking her phone back into the pocket of her pajama pants, Sabrina stared into the woods, hoping to regain the peace she’d felt only moments ago. But tears pricked her eyes, and today even the woods couldn’t ease the tension between her shoulders.
Six months was longer than she’d stayed in one location since she’d gone into hiding. Three months ago, she’d actually started venturing out for more than just essentials. This tiny little town had given her back something she hadn’t felt in a long time. Something she hadn’t felt since that very first contact from her stalker.
Despite all the solitude, she felt less alone than she had in almost two years.
She’d actually made friends here. Sure, they didn’t know her real last name, and in her normal life, she would have called this level of familiarity simple acquaintances. But with two years of loneliness, two years of running whenever she saw a shadow out of place, it felt like real progress. It almost felt like a real life again.
Guilt surged at the very idea that she could just move on with her life, in any small way. Now, the three months of memories she’d built with Dylan felt so distant, so short. She’d been naive to invite him into her life with a stalker following her, leaving her his twisted version of love notes. It wasn’t that she hadn’t been taking the threat seriously; it was just that she’d thought the threat was only against her.
But on a brilliantly bright Saturday afternoon when she’d gone to meet Dylan’s family for the first time at their lake house, Dylan had been late. She’d been annoyed until police had shown up to tell his family why.
He had died simply because he’d dated her. It was something she’d carried with her ever since.
Before Dylan was killed, police had been taking the letters seriously, but compared to the other crimes they were investigating, it was low priority. When Dylan had been shot inside his own home and then the letter arrived, telling her not to be sad because Dylan had been standing in the way of her true happiness, the police response had been much more intense.
A month later, though, they’d been at her door, their discouraged, too-serious expressions telling her everything she needed to know. With fingerprints and some DNA left behind at the scene of the crime, they were sure they’d get Dylan’s killer eventually. But he wasn’t in the system, so they couldn’t match the forensic evidence to a name. In the meantime, he’d continued to contact her, somehow slipping past the cameras police had installed, and once, slipping a note into her purse on her way home from work.
Dylan’s murder showed that her stalker was escalating, police had told her. She was in real danger, quite possibly his next target. They were committed to keeping her safe, committed to stopping the person who’d killed the man she had only just begun to call her boyfriend.
But they couldn’t provide twenty-four-hour protection. And she hadn’t been willing to risk anyone else she loved.
Sighing, Sabrina stepped back inside, all the healing powers of the Alaskan wilderness no longer working. The PI who’d helped her create a fake name and then disappear had set up a system, a place for her to check safely for updates. The investigator would post a specific message on her website if the stalker was ever caught.
In two years, there had been no updates. But no one else had been hurt because of her, either. If she had to spend the rest of her life running, at least she’d finally found somewhere she could imagine having even a fraction of the life she’d left behind.
If the years in between had taught her anything, it was that living like this could break your will, break your heart if you let it. Her stalker had taken the life she’d built, but he wasn’t going to steal all of her happiness.
“Buck up, Sabrina,” she told herself, then squared her shoulders to face the day. By the time she’d gotten dressed and was headed for the door, ready to run into town for some groceries, she felt almost normal. She was even smiling at the thought of trading small talk with the owner, Talise, who’d lived in Alaska all of her seventy years and always had good stories.
Then she opened the door, and the whole world spun in front of her. All the oxygen seemed to disappear as she gripped the doorframe to keep herself upright.
There was a single white card on her doorstep. On it, the same angled, spidery font she’d come to dread back in New York. The same bright red ink that reminded her of blood even more since Dylan’s death.
The message was simple, exactly what she would have expected if she hadn’t started to believe she’d finally outrun her stalker.
I’ve missed you.
Copyright © 2021 by Elizabeth Heiter
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ISBN-13: 9780369709004
Uncovering Small Town Secrets
Copyright © 2021 by Tyler Anne Snell
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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