Every Step You Take: A Psychological Thriller

by Avery Lane

  Every Step You Take

  A Psychological Thriller

  Avery Lane

  Copyright © 2018 by Avery Lane

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Epilogue: One Year Later

  Prologue

  I keep thinking about the sound of her crying. Which is strange, because at the time, it didn’t mean much to me. I was crying too. I wanted out just as bad as she did.

  What I didn’t realize was that I took those tears with me. I carried them in my heart. And without even realizing, I let those tears erode the muscle until I could no longer ignore the irreparable damage it had done to the way it beats.

  I only let her go because I couldn’t listen to her cry for another second. I couldn’t bear it. Don’t you know what it means to love someone this way?

  1

  Riley’s breath caught as she felt the razor-thin metal swipe across the pad of her index finger.

  So close. So effin’ close.

  Just a few millimeters more and she could secure some sort of grip on it.

  But she could tell she was already in too precarious a position to go any further. A position that would certainly horrify all that cared for her safety.

  She lowered herself carefully from her tip-toes, feeling the still plastic-wrapped phone book shift just slightly beneath her feet.

  Oops, she thought, clenching her teeth. She held her breath, hoping her stillness would secure a stable position.

  Riley looked down at her jury-rigged step-stool.

  Atop the scooped out seat of her wooden dining chair, she had stacked three phonebooks she found in her building’s lobby to give her the extra lift she needed to reach the top shelf of her kitchen cupboard. The shelf where her allergy medicine sat in their tinfoil sleeves, just out of reach.

  But three phonebooks weren’t enough. Not for the mere five feet she stood on a good day. So now she would be left to quietly rage, sleepless in her itchy-throated, watery-eyed frustration.

  She hopped back down to the stability of her hardwood floors, standing arms akimbo as she looked up at the open cupboard.

  Evan had purposely hidden her allergy medication all the way up there.

  At the peak of their troubles, Riley found it difficult to fall asleep. And nothing “natural” helped. Not blackout curtains, not blindfolds, not warm milk or hot baths. Not even that extra glass of cabernet she had come to rely on.

  But antihistamines always managed to knock her out.

  Evan called it “drug abuse” because she wasn’t taking the medication for its intended use. So he took her stash and put it in a place that she couldn’t even reach with the help of a chair.

  And while he wasn’t entirely wrong, his true reason for hiding Riley’s medication was not because he was concerned about her misuse. Evan just liked his role of dictator in their household of two. He liked the fact that he had near total power over another individual when he had zero control of his own mediocre life and for over a decade, he hid his controlling behavior under the guise of care.

  Because for nearly the entire tenure of their relationship, Riley had no idea this was happening at all.

  It all hit her one day – like a ton of bricks. In fact, it was only in that moment that Riley even understood the full meaning of that saying. The facts were there all along, collecting secretly in some safety net that hung above her head. Finally, one day, another random brick was tossed in – no different from any of the previous bricks. But it was the one that snapped that net. The one that gave her the courage to pack Evan’s bags and set them outside their apartment door.

  In the two months since he left, Riley had no trouble sleeping. But now that it was 2am and officially spring, Riley wished she had remembered earlier that he had sequestered her stash. The stash she now needed for its intended purposes.

  Maybe some hot water. If she wasn’t getting meds tonight, then she could perhaps scorch the irritation out of her throat.

  She listened to the gas ticking and watched as a roar of flames flicked up around the kettle.

  The sound reminded her of Evan – of those false recollections still erroneously filed under “good memories.”

  In their small, thin-walled one-bedroom, it was that sound that served as her morning alarm. He was always the one who made her coffee, and he always got it exactly how she liked it – light with two sugars. He sent her off to work with a packed breakfast every morning, usually a small mason jar of overnight oats topped with fresh blueberries or perfectly soft-boiled eggs. He had dinner ready when she got home, dinners that ranged from perfectly finished sous vide ribeyes to cacio e pepe so good, it rivaled her favorite Italian restaurants. He killed bugs, opened jars, fixed faucets, made sure the bills were paid. He could reach the top shelf of their absurdly high up kitchen cupboards.

  From the outside, he was the perfect husband. He did everything for her.

  And that was the point.

  Evan made Riley so dependent on him that even now, out of the haze of what she finally understood to be an unhealthy, dysfunctional marriage, her coffee still never tasted quite right and any meal she tried to cobble together served as a reminder of how little she knew how to do.

  She had lived three whole decades with no claim over her own life, no idea of who she was outside of the people she shared roofs with. In fact, Riley was pretty sure her chosen profession of event coordinator had everything to do with the fact that her subconscious understood her need for authority somewhere, anywhere in her day-to-day.

  A low whine escaped from the kettle and Riley turned off the heat before it could reach its high-pitch wail.

  She settled down on the couch with her cup of hot water, willing herself not to rub her eyes anymore than she already had.

  Riley leaned back, forcing her raw eyelids to shut over the sticky grit of her allergy-ravaged eyeballs.

  God, did she feel disgusting. And exhausted. All she wanted to do was sleep. But her nose was stuffy and every time she breathed in through her mouth, the fresh air just further irritated her throat.

  She hoped the makeup she owned was heavy-duty enough to cover up the inevitable rings around her eyes.

  Riley had been looking forward
to the coming morning for months. After running her business from home for the last seven years, she was finally going to meet her first clients at a real, actual office. She had secured the location shortly after Evan left and though it was far from the glamorous location that Riley had always imagined, her assistant Marco had been slaving away the past week to make the space as presentable and professional as possible.

  It felt like a momentous occasion. Having an actual office made Riley feel, well, official. Like her small business had suddenly been validated because it had its own address. But most importantly, it marked a new era for Riley – one where she could be a new person, perhaps someone closer to who she had always wanted to be. One where she could reimagine a future closer to the one that had previously only existed in her dreams.

  Shhhkkkk.

  Riley’s eyes snapped open.

  The strange sound had sliced through the silence of her apartment. She blinked, realizing only then that she had been dozing off.

  Riley sat up, setting down her cup on the side table as she looked around.

  It wasn’t an entirely unfamiliar noise. In fact, Riley thought it sounded like a menu slipping under the front door. Every time someone in the building ordered delivery, the delivery guys would diligently clog everyone’s doors with menus. Though she was just a bit cranky at having been woken up, Riley wasn’t about to judge the person who ordered delivery at 2am in the middle of the week. It wasn’t like she hadn’t done it at least a handful of times since Evan left. It was just one of those perks of living in New York that everyone exploited.

  She hopped up on her feet and made her way over.

  Sure enough, something peeked out from under her front door. Riley’s eyes were bleary from allergies and sleepiness, but it indeed looked like the corner of a menu. She picked it up.

  The thick, plasticky surface struck her first. Then, the unusual weight and shape.

  Riley ran her thumb over the white-framed black square in her hands.

  She was looking at the back of a Polaroid picture.

  Weird.

  She turned it over.

  At first, the photo didn’t really strike her as anything at all. It looked like a picture that had been taken by accident, the way you would if you had dropped your phone with your camera on.

  But this was a Polaroid.

  Which meant that it took a little more effort to pop out a photo.

  Suddenly, it struck her what she was looking at.

  She squinted at the photo to make sure she was seeing right.

  The lower third of the picture was the speckled tan floors of her apartment building’s hallways. The upper two thirds were occupied by one of the green doors marking individual apartment units. The gold number nailed to the front was the number 7.

  Her apartment number.

  Her door.

  A quick chill ran up her spine.

  What in the hell?

  Before she could think, Riley had already swung open her front door and plodded out in her slippers. Her body always reacted before her mind could. Had she stopped even for a second, she would have realized that running out at 2am into potential danger clad only in pajamas was probably a bad idea. Just like climbing up on your tiptoes atop poorly balanced phone books was a bad idea.

  A draft crept up her flannel shorts.

  There was no one there.

  She rushed to the stairwell, leaning over the banister to look down towards the building’s lobby. Riley stayed perfectly still, listening for footsteps.

  Nothing.

  All she could hear was the blood rushing in her ears. The pulsing hum of her heart against her ribcage. The faint whistle of a night breeze creeping through the cracks of their pre-war building.

  She stepped back into her apartment, shutting the door behind her.

  Every hair on her body was standing on end.

  Her body knew to be scared, but as per usual, her brain hadn’t caught up.

  Her brain was just angry.

  Evan.

  Classic Evan.

  She had blocked his number after he broke her “no contact without lawyers” rule by sending a steady stream of hundreds of repetitive texts, berating her for callously casting him out of her life when he had done nothing but “give her everything he had.”

  Please.

  She set the Polaroid down on her kitchen counter, sucking in air through her teeth as she stopped herself from unblocking Evan’s number just so she could scream at him.

  It was then that she noticed something scribbled on the white frame of the photo, right where she had been gripping it.

  A note.

  She squinted at the smudged ballpoint handwriting.

  We’re never really alone.

  2

  Riley arrived at the office as put together as she could be considering the events of the previous night.

  She was forced to let go of how she had envisioned this morning going as soon as she realized she’d be running on a collective hour or so of sleep.

  Originally, she had considered making an event of this day.

  Riley imagined waking up bright and early, taking a long luxurious shower, blowing out and flat-ironing her frizzy auburn hair, and putting on the sort of refined but understated makeup that all the young professional women in rom-coms always had on. She’d march into the office in her favorite emerald green blouse tucked into her black pencil skirt with a solid hour to admire the beginning of her new life before the clients even got in.

  Instead, Riley struggled just to look halfway presentable.

  With the help of some YouTube tutorials and color correction makeup she had bought years ago but never opened (and hoped wasn’t somehow expired), she had managed to neutralize the purple rings around her eyes and the red blotches around her nose. It, however, did nothing for her weary expression, but she hoped the coffee she asked Marco to pick up for her would do the trick.

  Her office was a finished corner on the second floor of a huge, mostly unoccupied four-story building that sat on the Gowanus Canal. Like many buildings in the neighborhood, it was an abandoned factory with aspirations of becoming high-end condos and retail space but was stuck in the purgatory of building permits and regulations.

  Riley had snagged her steeply discounted office because her mother Judy was somehow good friends with the building owner’s parents and trusted Riley to keep to her corner while they struggled with the logistics of finishing the building. So she happily became one of four questionably legal tenants in the very unfinished, barely occupiable building.

  Her office was there along with a barebones café in the lobby, the curmudgeon of a CPA next to that, and the studio right below Riley’s office – what she thought was perhaps a karate dojo judging from the war cries she often heard rattling through the vents.

  At first, she had been reluctant to let her mother help her with anything. She was nervous that accepting aid from Judy invited her to poke at the boundaries that Riley had managed to set between them over the years.

  And it was weird to even think that an elderly farm town hermit like Judy had any legitimate connections in the city at all. Even though Riley knew that Judy had lived in the city in her youth, the idea that she was the one who would ultimately find Riley her office space was still pretty mind-blowing.

  Riley’s heels echoed down the hall.

  The second floor was not quite as finished as the lobby but looked a hell of a lot better than the two floors above it. There were still exposed steel beams outlining where the future offices would be along with some freshly plastered but unpainted walls. It was still far more professional than having clients meet her in cafes and having Marco take calls from his own cell phone while sitting on her couch at home. And it wasn’t like she could afford anything else. She was lucky to have this space at all.

  As she approached the door, she could hear Marco on the phone.

  Riley smiled, feeling lucky to have such a diligent and hardworking assistant
. Marco had been with her since he was a sophomore in college and at only twenty-three, carried himself with more professionalism and grace than Riley could ever imagine for herself. She would be envious of his put-togetherness if it didn’t benefit her business so greatly.

  Just when her hand wrapped around the doorknob, Riley made out a second voice on the other side. Her heart stopped.

  Oh shit, the clients are early.

  Riley took in a deep breath, trying to calm herself. She had really banked on having a little time to get to her coffee and settle in before having her meeting. She really needed it. But she settled on simply smoothing her hands over her hair, fanning it out as neatly as she could around her shoulders, and taking in a deep breath. Then she opened the door, mustering up her best smile.

  Immediately, her smile fell.

  “I’m so sorry,” Marco sputtered upon seeing her. “I asked him to leave.”

  His wiry frame looked tense in his fitted white button-down. His normally tidy black undercut was becoming undone. He clutched a binder to his chest, as if it were a shield.

  Across from him stood a man facing away from her. He didn’t have to turn for her to know who it was.

  Evan had never really ever been an intimidating looking man. He was tallish, skinny, wore his dirty blond hair messy like a college kid. But Evan’s innocuous appearance was always part of his danger. It was what allowed people like him to get away with the terrible things they did.