Home safe. Knob checked twice.
It's not romantic. It's roll call.
She checks in, I confirm, and we both pretend this is how couples are supposed to work.
Krypton glances at my phone after the fourth buzz. His eyebrow lifts.
I pocket the phone. "Don't start."
He holds both palms up, lips pressed tight against a grin. "Didn't say a word."
I don't look up from the screen. "You were about to."
"I was going to say your girl texts more than my ex-wife." He turns to his monitor. "And my ex-wife was relentless."
My jaw tightens. "She's not paranoid. She's being stalked."
Krypton's grin fades. He nods once, the humor draining, a man who's been in this club long enough to know where stalking leads.
"Then we finish this." He cracks his knuckles over the keyboard. "One problem at a time."
One problem at a time doesn't survive contact with reality.
By Thursday, I'm running on four hours of sleep, attendance in two of my classes is a memory, and my cybersecurity professor has emailed twice asking if I'm still enrolled.
The digital threat takes my nights. Saylor takes my days. Creedy takes whatever's left.
Statistics is the first casualty. I sit in Armstrong Hall on Tuesday, and the numbers swim on the board.
Saylor's empty seat beside me makes the room feel off-balance. She skipped class.
She's been skipping things—class, grocery runs, the walk to campus she used to take alone. Her world is shrinking because a man with a smile and a truck is making it smaller every day.
I text her during the lecture:
Missed you in class. You okay?
She takes about ten minutes to respond back:
Didn't feel like being looked at today.
Seven words. Each one a blade.
The woman who spent years making herself invisible is being forced into visibility by a true crime forum and a town with a long memory.
The one place she used to disappear—the back row of a statistics class—isn't safe anymore.
Dr. Hasan stops me after cybersecurity on Wednesday.
He's noticed the drop in my attendance, the assignments I've been turning in late, the shadows under my eyes.
"Everything all right?" He asks it the way professors do, concerned but boundaried.
I nod and give him the line. "Family stuff. I'll catch up."
He doesn't push. But his expression says he's keeping track, and a man who teaches cybersecurity for a living is very good at tracking patterns.
The irony isn't lost on me. My professor is watching me the way I watch networks.