The next day, Cassie stood at the doorway to her news director’s office, took a deep breath, and knocked on the open door. Buried in work at his desk, Steve glanced up quickly.

“Hi, Steve. Do you have a minute?”

“Enter,” he said.

She took a seat opposite his desk and waited as he minimized the document on his screen.

“What’s up, Holt?” he asked, giving her his full attention. He must have seen the dread in her eyes, because his own narrowed. “Don’t tell me you’re quitting already. I expected at least six months out of you, if not a year. You know you need to repay us for moving expenses if you don’t stick it out a year.”

“It’s not that,” Cassie said. “I want to be here. I actually went fishing yesterday to learn how to be more Alaskan.”

“Hmm. Who’d you go with?”

“Cody Bradford.”

“Your firefighter feature story.” Steve raised an eyebrow. “Are you two shacking up?”

“No,” she said quickly. “It was just a fishing lesson, not a date.”

That had become clear when Cody unceremoniously dropped her back off at home shortly after she caught the fish. She’d hoped and expected they’d clean the fish and fry it up and make a whole meal out of it, but Cody said he had somewhere to be and drove her home instead, not even giving her a perfunctory kiss on the cheek when he dropped her off. It felt to her like things had gone south after she cried about the fish. Men can’t handle women’s tears, she thought, and given Cody’s background, he probably refused to on principle.

She expected Steve was the same. If she cried now, he’d probably escort her from the building, so she took a deep, steadying breath before continuing.

“I’m here because I need to tell you something, and I need to ask a favor of you.”

He leaned back, settling in for the conversation. “Go on.”

“When I took this job, I did come here because it would give me anchor experience, like I told you,” Cassie said. “That really was a factor. I’d get to do things I wouldn’t be able to do at a large media market station for years. And I’m so grateful for the opportunity.”

“But …?”

“But I also took the job because I needed to get out of New York, and I had to get off the radar.” She shifted in her chair, hating that she had to tell him anything at all. “I have a stalker. Some guy who’d seen me on the news the few times I was on-air during my internship at NBC, and it was getting scary.”

She told Steve what had happened, everything. How she’d begged for the chance to report on-air, how her first spot on a slow news day had been a thirty-second bit about a goofy viral video of a man riding a hoverboard down the subway stairs at Union Square. She’d done well and got a second story, this one a full minute reporting on a bridge closure due to an accident. By the time her summer internship ended, she’d done ten segments, all at the end of the local broadcast, none earth-shattering news, but she’d gone into her final year at Columbia riding high.

Shortly before her internship ended, the messages had started.

It was innocuous at first: an email to her NBC address. It was long, gushed with inappropriate compliments, and ended with a somewhat awkward attempt to ask her out, signed simply, “Doug.”

Flattered, she’d written a kindly response, thanking him for being a fan and explaining she had a boyfriend—not a lie, as she’d just started seeing Jason.

Doug’s response had been immediate and alarming. He wrote her an even longer email, detailing all the reasons they belonged together—absurd, illogical, clearly the product of a deranged mind—and full of emotional pleas to take him seriously and not break his heart. He could give her a good life, he’d said. One where she didn’t have to work and she could just stay home and he’d take care of her. Cassie had shown the email to Abby, who agreed it sounded like he wanted to lock her in a house and keep her captive somewhere, playing out his sick fantasy.

“Did you tell the station?” Steve inquired.

“No, because my internship was ending, and I didn’t want anything like that on my record. I wanted a clean reference, you know?”

Steve frowned.

“Plus, since I was leaving, I figured he wouldn’t be able to get hold of me because he only had my email address from the station.”

“Let me guess. He found you on social media.”

“Yes, but I didn’t know it at first,” Cassie said. “His messages only came via email, but apparently he was stalking me online the whole time without me knowing it. Then he sent flowers and a five-page-long letter to my apartment for my birthday, and it really freaked me out that he knew where I lived.”

“And that he knew it was your birthday.”

“Right. And the flowers were actually a bridal bouquet, because I was going to be his bride. In the letter, he said he was going to tame me and teach me how to be his well-behaved wife.” She shuddered. “I’ll never look at lilies the same way again.”

“It sounds terrifying.”

“It was. I took the letter to the police,” she continued. “They gave me some advice about making my social media more private and telling me to take a self-defense class, which I did, but finding my stalker didn’t seem very high on their priority list. I even hired a private investigator so I could get his name and a restraining order, but it was like finding a needle in a haystack.”

“Did you ever come face to face with him?”

“I did.” Unwelcome tears filled Cassie’s eyes, and she wiped them away in a hurry. “Sorry.”

“No need to apologize.”

“I ordered a rideshare once—are you familiar with Uber and Lyft?”

“Yes, we have both here.”

“Oh! I didn’t realize that. Anyway, one day when I called for one, a car pulled up in front of my apartment and I got in, thinking nothing of it.” She shivered at the memory. “It was him, and I didn’t realize it for a while, but I suddenly got really bad vibes, like my internal warning system was screaming at me to get out of the car. Then I got a notification on my phone that my ride had arrived, which was also weird seeing as I was already in it, so I asked him to pull over and said I’d get out there. But, of course, he’d locked all the doors. When he realized I knew it was him, he gave me the freakiest smile and tried to hand me a small bag from a lingerie store, saying he’d always known I’d come to him one day and he’d bought me something for our first night together.”

She fixed her gaze on the sharp edge of Steve’s desk, remembering Doug’s face, the sound of his voice, as he tried to hand her the bag.

“Shit,” Steve said. “What did you do?”

“Well, I didn’t take the bag! I had my phone in my hand, and I called 911, which I should have done before anything else. And thanks to New York traffic, he couldn’t go anywhere fast. When he realized he was stuck, he unlocked the doors, called me a bitch, promised he’d come for me later, and yelled at me to get out. I just took off running.”

“The cops didn’t catch him?” Steve asked. “There must have been a record of him picking you up.”

“He wasn’t a real driver,” she said. “He’d just watched me enough to know I often called for a ride outside my apartment, and he posed as a driver and picked me up. He had an identifier on his windshield, but it wasn’t valid, although I didn’t know that. I didn’t think twice, and I definitely wasn’t paying enough attention. Damn smartphones. I was distracted. Anyway, that’s what happened.”

“I’m sorry you went through that,” Steve said. “And I’m sorry the cops didn’t take you seriously. That’s bullshit.”

“Thank you,” Cassie said. “Anyway, soon after that, this job popped up and it felt like a sign. When you hired me, I chose a new professional name and made sure not to create a public record anywhere of my new location, and life has been pretty good since I got here. I thought I was safe. I thought it was all behind me.”

“And yet you’re telling me this now,” Steve said. “I’m sure it’s something you would have preferred to keep private.”

She nodded. “The only thing I kept was my phone number. It was registered to my father’s account, unlisted, and the stalker had never contacted me by phone or text, so I figured it was okay to keep it.” She gave a shrug of resignation at what she now realized had been a mistake. “I’ve had that number since middle school. I just … it means something to me. I don’t know, but it just felt like a part of me.” She laughed self-consciously. “Weird, huh?”

He shook his head. “I’ve had the same number my whole life, too. I get it.”

“Anyway, I’m telling you this now because he called me yesterday, and then he followed up with some texts.” As Steve’s eyebrows shot up, she reassured him. “He doesn’t seem to know where I am, although he did threaten to come looking for me. In any case, I disconnected my phone number last night.”

“Good,” Steve said.

“And so the favor is, I need a new number, but it can’t be registered to me, and I was hoping I could get it through the station.”

“Of course,” he said.

“I could pay for it.”

“No, no,” he said. “That’s a cost we can pick up. And when you do move on from here, you can transition to another new number, and that’s probably not a bad thing.”

“Thank you,” Cassie said, standing up. “I’m sorry I even had to bring this up.”

“Not a problem and don’t be sorry,” Steve said. “It’s a hazard of this job, especially for female journalists. Every news director worth his or her salt is aware of the issue. Just to be on the safe side, I recommend you talk to the police chief here, too. I’ll put in a call and give him a heads-up. Does the guy have a New York accent?”

“He does, actually. He sounds like a native New Yorker. Working class. He says his name’s Doug, but who knows if that’s really his name.”

“All right. So we’ll keep an eye out for a native New Yorker potentially named Doug, working class with a side of psycho. When you get your new number, which HR can help you with, make sure you have my number programmed into it, and call anytime, day or night, even if you think it’s probably nothing. You got it?”

“I do, thanks.”

She was touched; her new boss took the situation more seriously than her own parents had.

“You should let Cody Bradford know what’s going on, too.”

She shook her head, having already decided against it. Cody had made clear his disdain for women who couldn’t take care of themselves. The last thing she wanted was to come across as high maintenance.

“He doesn’t need to know,” she said. “Like I said, he just gave me a fishing lesson.”

“Uh huh,” Steve said, as if he believed otherwise.

“And Steve? Can we not tell Michael and the rest of the staff about the stalking situation? For reasons I’m sure you understand, I’d greatly prefer to keep my private life private.”

“I’ll send out a staff memo—generic, not mentioning you by name—to remind everybody about the station policy to never to give out personal information. We’ll keep this on a need-to-know basis.”

“Sounds great,” Cassie said, “Thank you, Steve. I really do appreciate it.”

Her thoughts went back to Cody, he of the you’ve-got-to-save-yourself-in-this-world mentality.

Cody most definitely did not need to know.