"No. Not since the locks." A pause. "But I see the truck, Saylor."
Her footsteps resume, faster now. "On my street when I leave for work. At Kroger when I'm shopping."
Her voice drops. "He's not hiding. He wants me to know he's around."
I press my forehead against the cabinet. The lemon cleaner smell fills my nose, and I breathe it in because it smells like safety, like my clean apartment, like the one corner of my life I can still control.
I'm already on my feet. "I'm coming over."
"You don't need to come over every time I call, sweetheart."
"I'm coming over." I grab my keys. "Put the chain on. I'll be there in ten."
She doesn't argue. She stopped arguing after the first time.
I drive to her house with my mirrors angled wider than usual, checking for headlights behind me. A dark truck. An older model. Blue or black.
Every vehicle on the road is a candidate. Every set of headlights is a question.
When I get to her street, I drive past the house once before pulling into the driveway. Scanning. Looking for a truck parked on the curb, a figure sitting in the dark.
The street is empty. Her porch light is on.
She opens the door before I knock. She always does.
We sit at the kitchen table with hot tea neither of us drinks and talk about what we can do, which is nothing, and what we should do, which is everything, and how the gap between those two things is wide enough to swallow us both.
"Maybe I should talk to him." She says it into her mug, not looking at me.
"No." The word comes out harder than I mean it to. "You don't talk to him. You don't engage. You don't give him anything to work with."
Her voice wavers. "Saylor?—"
"Men like him read engagement as invitation, Mom. Any response is a yes. Silence is the only no they can't twist."
She looks at me across the table, and her expression is one I've seen in my own mirror a hundred times.
Exhaustion. Not tired-from-work exhaustion. The bone-deep weariness of a woman who spent her whole life recovering from one dangerous man and now has to deal with another one.
"We could move." She says it like she's testing the words. Seeing how they sound in the air.
"We're not moving." I wrap my fingers around the mug and squeeze until my knuckles ache.
"We moved once. We changed our names once. We rebuilt once. I'm not doing it again because some man my father met in a cell thinks he's owed access to our lives."
She reaches across the table and covers my grip with her palm.
We sit there. The clock on her wall ticks.
Outside, the February wind pushes against the windows hard enough to make the glass rattle in its frame.
I stay the night again.
* * *
At Backroads on Friday, I burn through my shift on autopilot.
Pour, serve, wipe, restock. Running on autopilot carries me through while my brain cycles through the same loop it's been stuck in for days.