You’re not staying here.”

Adam’s voice sounded like he was very far away as he said it. More accurately, I was very far away. I had felt arms clutch me to a solid chest and then the embrace of someone much smaller; Adam and then Mimi. The box. The pictures. The hair. Oh my god, all those phone calls from numbers I didn’t recognize.

How had Henry been able to find me? How long had he been out of jail? I thought about where he would have to be in order to snap some of those pictures. How many more were there? Had he been going through our trash? Why the hell had he kept that hair? I didn’t need to check my scalp for the bald spot. I knew exactly when and where he had taken it. Hair was one of the more innocent things you could take from someone’s body since it didn’t require mutilation, but it still made me feel sick. He had sent it to fuck with me; his favorite pastime.

I knew Adam was referring to me as he made the statement, but I had nothing to give him back. I felt immobilized. Stunned into silence. The contents of the box were the absolute last thing I could have possibly anticipated seeing, but what got me was how familiar all the items inside were. It was me. It was me in that box. A condensed little package of my inner life. The inner life which I had been trying to create away from LA and the drama that had happened there. The pictures weren’t dated, but they were a couple of weeks old, at the very least.

Christ, my hair though. The lock was intact; the strands blunt on one end where he had used scissors to cut it off. He likely didn’t even wake me up the night that he did it. All I remember was waking one day and wondering why one bit of hair behind my ear was sticking out so much. I wondered vaguely whether it would be more or less creepy if the hair had come directly off my head or had been collected from my brush over months. The sinister thing was that he had kept it. What the hell did he do with it? Just how much of my stuff did he have? Briefly incapacitated, the conversation progressed without me.

“Well, where the hell do you expect her to go?” Mimi asked him.

“My dad’s house,” I said robotically. At least my flight response wasn’t disabled.

“No. My house. She’s staying with me,” Adam said.

“How do you know he doesn’t know who you are?”

“Look at the pictures. He photographed you with your dad. He has to know where he lives.”

“I think she should go back to LA.”

“If she does he’ll just follow her back there. You really want to give him home-field advantage?”

“Guys—” I attempted. The fog was lifting, and there was no way the two of them were going to have a conversation about me and what my next move was without my input.

“You can’t stay here either,” he said to Mimi.

“Guys!”

The two of them fell silent and looked at me.

“I’m not running away anymore.”

“Dana. You can’t play games with this guy. You know what he’s capable of. If he’s back, he’s probably angry on top of crazy,” Adam said.

I shook my head.

“I’m going to the police.”

“You need somewhere safe to stay before you do any of that.”

“The sooner I call the police, the sooner he gets put into their custody,” I said, the dots connecting mentally.

“Fuck the police. You don’t know where this guy is. He had to be in San Diego if he could take any of these pictures, but he mailed this from Los Angeles. He could be anywhere. How long do you suppose it’s going to take to issue the arrest warrant and get him if he’s mobile?”

I rolled my eyes. Fuck the police. They had the most power in this situation. He arguably had more experience with arrests and being arrested than I did and I didn’t have any solid points to argue him on besides my wounded pride and confidence. I didn’t want to run. I didn’t want him to hijack my life like he had before. I didn’t want to lose sleep at night, afraid that if I woke up, he would be there standing over me. I didn’t need to be afraid to fall asleep at night because I feared he would show up again and do something worse next time. He had injured me before. If he was enraged, there was no telling what he could do to me now.

“Adam, if this starts again, when will it end?” I asked. “He stalked me for months in LA. I moved here because I wanted to get away from it all, to have a fresh start. I can’t let him scare me all the way into Mexico.”

“Your safety is the most important thing to me right now, Dana. I’m not asking you to go to Mexico. Stay with me. Mimi can stay with Anthony,” he said glancing over at her to see whether she had any objections. “When you are both at addresses he likely doesn’t know; you can start contacting the authorities.”

I sighed and looked at Mimi.

“Will you be able to stay with Anthony for a while? Will he mind?” I asked her.

She shrugged.

“If I tell him what happened, he might understand. Although, that may lead to a number of other questions he might have; personal questions Day… about you.”

I shook my head.

“It doesn’t matter. You can tell him whatever he wants to know. You just need to be out of here.” I looked at Adam. He was looking at Mimi like he wanted to say something but he wouldn’t.

“What?” she asked him.

“Is Anthony your only option?” he asked carefully.

“He’s not the only one, but he’s the best. It probably wouldn’t be too much of an imposition if it was him. If push came to shove, there is always my parents. Why do you ask?”

He looked down.

“No reason. Start packing. Both of you.”

* * *

About an hour or so later, we were in the living room, waiting for Anthony to show up so he could pick Mimi up. The phone conversation asking him to come to the house had been a very long and interesting one where he had asked to speak to all three of us, like the claims made by one needed corroboration from the others.

He finally showed up, ringing the doorbell. Mimi went to get it and walked into the living area with him.

“Everything looks under control here,” he remarked. “The way you talked about this I was expecting a lot more tears. Hysterics.”

“No need to make this any more dramatic than it is. The women just need somewhere to stay before this place is safe for them again.”

“So the men in their life have to intervene. I get it.” I appreciated his attempt at a joke, but I wasn’t in the jolliest of moods.

“This isn’t too much trouble. Is it babe?” Mimi asked him.

“Not at all,” he said shortly. “Not when there’s a psycho on the loose.” He kissed her then looked over at me, sort of sheepishly.

“Dana, I know this is sort of a weird question, but can I see the box?” he asked me.

“It’s in the kitchen, on the counter. Just don’t take anything out. If the police need it as evidence it all needs to be there,” I said. The look on his face was restrained excitement. He went into the kitchen and looked before coming back and grabbing Mimi’s bag, taking it out with him to the car. Just like before. So many people had this morbid fascination with what had happened to me. I was not ready to see my life turn into a sideshow again.

Mimi walked over to me and hugged me hard, saying she’d call as soon as she and Anthony got to his house. She approached Adam and sort of stood there like she wanted to acknowledge him but a hug was too personal.

“Are you sure Anthony’s the best you can do for now?” he asked her again.

“Unless you are inviting me into your home, yes. Why do you keep asking that?”

Adam glanced over at me before he sighed and looked at Mimi.

“Look. I know you don’t really trust me, but I think you should be careful with Anthony,” he said cryptically.

“You think he’s dangerous?”

“Not dangerous. He won’t put you in any danger… I just wouldn’t trust him too much.”

“God, if he’s doing something illegal and you know what it is, just tell me,” she snapped.

“He’s not breaking the law. Just keep an eye on him,” he said. I looked between them. When the hell had they started having inside conversations without me? Mimi left. Everything I wanted to carry fit in a duffel he could balance in front of him all the way to his house with me on the back of the bike.

* * *

I had been to Adam’s before, but I hadn’t made it all the way inside the house the first time I came over. It was clearly a bachelor pad. Clean and tidy and bare in the manner of male minimalism. Guys didn’t own more than two coffee mugs because they thought they needed them, they owned more than two coffee mugs because their girlfriend or wife who had also introduced them to decorative throw pillows thought they needed them. Nothing on the walls, except a clock and a larger television that I even knew was available for use in homes. We were in the kitchen. I nursed the cup of hot tea he had made for me while he drank a beer. I was up on the counter while he sat leaning against the dining table which I had the sneaking suspicion never got used all that often.

“Your ex who got attached?” he asked me. I sighed. If there was a time that the curtain was going to have to be lifted, it was now. “Tell me what happened Dana.”

“Okay. Back in LA, Henry and I were together. After a few months of dating, he moved in with me. Everyone loved him. He was friends with my mom and stepdad, my brother liked him… he was great. After a while living together, he began to change.” I stopped and looked at Adam. I hadn’t spoken about the incident to anybody since telling Mimi.

“What happened?”

“He started being very… jealous. He yelled a lot. We started having a lot of fights over nothing in particular. He didn’t like that I used the dining table as a workstation sometimes, or he didn’t like the fact that one of Jaden’s friends had recognized me on the street and came to say hi to me. Stupid stuff. One day, I told him that I had had enough. I didn’t want to be with him anymore, and he had a meltdown. We had this horrible fight where one of our neighbors had to knock at the door to make sure everything was okay. He couldn’t move out because he had nowhere to go. He crashed on the couch while he looked for another place. Once he moved out, I stopped receiving my mail. I would come home, and my things would be moved around. People would tell me that I had sent them emails that I hadn’t sent.”

“I got my locks changed, but he still got into the house somehow. I ended up moving back to my parent’s house, and one night, I woke up and found him standing over me. He wasn’t doing anything, just standing and staring at me. I screamed, and my parents restrained him while the police came. We took him to court, and he was charged with stalking, breaking and entering and assault. I lived in my parent’s house for a while before I finally moved here a few months ago. They didn’t want me to go, but I had to. I didn’t want it to keep being the center of my life. I wanted to move on.”

“How long was he in jail?”

“I don’t know, but he’s clearly out now,” I said, sighing.

“What were the assault charges?”

I stayed silent. He hadn’t forgotten. I was sort of hoping that he wouldn’t bring it up from the last time I had mentioned it that night at the store. I looked into my cup of cold tea. I felt tears sting my eyes. Not because I was sad; I was upset. I thought I’d finally be able to leave this in the past.

“Hey.”

I looked up. Adam was right in front of me. His hands were on my knees. “What did he do to you? Did he make you do something you didn’t want to do? Force you?”

“No, never,” I sniffed. That was the second time he had asked me that. “When we were together, he would always make coffee in the morning. A lot of times he would bring it to me when I was still in bed. One day, right before I ended up moving back to my parents’ house after the breakup, he woke me up. He was standing over my bed and yelling at me to get up. It was still dark outside. I woke up, and I panicked because he wasn’t supposed to be in the house. We had broken up. He was holding the coffee pot, and he was saying he had made me some… talking about how much I loved my morning coffee. He… he pulled the covers off of me and spilled the scalding hot coffee over my hip and legs. I was wearing shorts… the damage varied, but it was mostly third and second-degree burns.” I ran a finger over my clothed thigh where the almost invisible scars from the graft were on my right leg. “I was in recovery for a while, and you can hardly tell that it happened because I got skin grafts but… yeah.”

The grip that Adam’s hands had on my knees tightened. I peered up at him.

“I’m going to kill him.”

“You’ll go back to prison if you do that.”

“If I get a reasonable judge, I could explain it to him. He’d understand.”

“Adam. It’s fine. You’ve seen me naked. You can hardly even tell.”

“Does your dad know?” he asked.

“He doesn’t… and I’d like to keep it that way.”

“That’s no longer an option, Doll. If Henry’s in town, your father has to know. Your mom in LA needs to know too.”

I shook my head.

“My life here is finally turning into something, Adam. I can’t start over again. How? Where?”

He took the mug and placed it on the counter while he hugged me. “I won’t let anything happen to you, Doll. He wants you; he has to go through me.”

I hugged him back and just let myself feel safe in his arms. How was he planning on doing that exactly? Who said Henry didn’t have guns now or wasn’t above arson? Who said he wasn’t watching us right now? I closed my eyes. I didn’t know a lot of things, but I did know one; Adam would look out for me.

I didn’t know how, but I knew he would.