The baby’s fist is no bigger than my pinky finger, and I can’t stop staring at it, squeezing in spasms as if she can’t stop. As if she’s in pain. I hope not. I pray not. I want to make her better, to make her pain go away.

“Penny? Your shift is over. You can go.”

I wipe the tears from my cheeks before I turn to the doctor, but I keep my eyes averted, hoping she can’t see I’m crying. “I’ll leave in a minute.” My stare fixes on baby Delilah’s name tag.

Dr. Alvarez sighs behind me. “I’m taking you off neonatal ICU. It’s too much for you.”

I jerk my gaze to her. “It’s not. I can handle it.” My heart surges. This is where I need to be—where the little ones need all the attention they can get.

Her eyes, full of compassion, are filled with the sympathy I both loathe and depend on. “For a little while.” She lowers her voice and puts a gentle hand on my arm. “Maybe in a few months when you’re not coping with so much.”

I hate her words, though I know she’s right. I hate even more the tears they bring to my eyes. “Fine.” I pull away.

“It will get easier.” Dr. Alvarez pushes her glasses up her nose. “When I lost my father it took—”

I don’t stay to hear her finish. I shouldn’t walk away from my boss like that, but the race to the locker room is a familiar one. Leaving work in a fit of tears has become a daily thing.

For the first month, I didn’t cry. I was numb and spent weeks pretending it wasn’t real, looking at pictures of him holding me on his shoulders as a child, watching home movies of him teaching me to ride a horse.

But now, it’s become real. The loneliness is more than I ever imagined it could be. I never knew how much those ten-minute phone calls three times a week sustained me. I still reach for my phone to tell him about something that happened in my day.

Anything I can do to not think about him, to keep the truth that he is gone locked away where I don’t have to think about it—I want that. I want to forget that the hospital NICU where I work every day—did work every day—was founded by his donation

Dr. Alvarez doesn’t understand. No one understands. They think they do. They might say they do. But none of them know me, and none of them know how he was with me and the kind of man he was.

None of them know.

When I leave the elevator bank on the first floor, he’s there—my distraction. Outside, leaning against the pillars. He looks up, and that look is in his eyes, like I’m something worthy of crushing, worthy of devastating. Fear bursts beneath my skin, and the temptation to intensify it, to feel less of this grief-sickened pain—it’s too great to resist.

The entranceway is lit bright enough to still be daylight, though it’s after dark. The valets help patients in and out of their cars mere feet away. It’s perfectly safe. There’s no reason to fear confronting the stranger who’s been stalking me for five days. I have no idea what he’ll do, which makes it worse. Or better.

And yet I feel it, my heart slamming harder against my ribs with each step. My hands sweating as I make out his face more clearly, those unseeing eyes filled with so much, yet empty of so much more.

The terror building in my gut is a relief. It chases away my tears and makes me forget everything but his stare. And how I want to lose myself in it. I don’t care what he does. I want more of this feeling.

His severe brow lifts, registering that I’m coming to him. He straightens, the first time I’ve seen him at full height. He’s taller than I thought, more threatening from up close. My gaze flits over the angular planes of his chest and shoulders. I’m unable not to stare.

He doesn’t smile in triumph, but I can tell by the tilt of his head, the tips of his yellow hair brushing his cheek, he’s pleased. He wants me to come to him. A lamb to the slaughter.

I stop a few feet away. A calculated distance, far enough he can’t reach me, close enough no one will hear us, then change my mind. I want to be as close as he’ll let me. To soak in his heat. To smell how much man he is.

I move to step nearer, but he holds out a hand to stop me. Not too close, it means.

His hand—long fingers, broad palm, rising from a sinew-wrapped forearm. I do as it says and stay where I am.

“Why?”

I don’t know which I’m asking: Why are you here? Why are you following me? Why are you stopping me?

Why me?

His fists clench and unclench. “I’m going to ruin your life.” His voice grates, low and strained, different from what I expected. And yet more familiar than I expected. His accent—the lazy consonants and rounded drawl—reveals he’s from where I’m from, the South, Tennessee precisely.

He looks young. By his face he’s my age, no more than twenty-five, but by that voice, he sounds much older.

“What are you going to do to me?” I keep waiting for him to lick his lips, like he wants to taste me, bite me, eat me—like a big bad wolf. A thrilling mix of panic and excitement stirs in my chest, forces a sharp breath from my lungs. God help me, I like it. Like a junkie craves a high, and I can’t help my lips quirking in a smile. It feels strange. I like that too.

His brows lower, shading his light, colorless eyes. “I know things.”

“Tell me.” His mouth—I will listen to everything those lips have to say. I step closer, and this time he doesn’t stop me. “How do you know me?” I’m fixated on his mouth and glimpsing his tongue, when he says:

“Your father.”

It could be the way he says it, like an accusation, a damnation, but it rams me in the stomach. Physical pain—shards of glass ripping through my veins. It reverberates in my skull like a brilliant scream in a marble hall. It shatters any control I held over my brittle emotions.

I back away.

Fury slashes across his face. “Stop.” He lunges to grab me.

I pull away. “Don’t.” I heave it from my lungs. I can’t hear it. Anything he has to say after that word—father—will cause me more damage than my fragile heart can bear.

He bites out, “Penny.”

Hackles scrape up my spine. “How do you know my name?”

“Because. I do.” He steps in front of the lights, shrouding his brutal expression in darkness.

“Why?” A horn blares behind me, and I turn to see the parking attendant rush to open a car door.

“We have to talk,” he hisses in my ear, but he’s too close. It shocks me.

I stumble backward and trip. Before I go down, I regain my feet, but not before he succeeds in grabbing me. He wraps my arm in a rough grip, his fingers digging into my bicep. I struggle but only a little.

I want to tear away but don’t. I lean into him, my fingers pressing into his chest. And I smell him.

It’s a fiery aroma of heat and strength, malice and danger. I don’t have the wits to process that the set of his jaw, the grind of his teeth, and the flare of his nostrils should make me panic and run.

I only breathe, frozen, combatting the insane urge to bury my face in his shirt.

“You will listen to me,” he growls low. The warmth of his breath on my cheek startles my mind back to its senses.

I stiffen and look into his darkened eyes. I whisper, “Let me go,” even though I don’t expect him to.

And yet, without protest, he drops his hand.

Disappointment claws at my throat, which I squash. I didn’t really want him to hurt me, did I?

I shove away from him.

He doesn’t follow. “You won’t escape me.”

I shiver, turn my back, and walk as fast as my wobbly legs will move to my car.

I block it out. I reject it. I pretend it’s not there. I pretend he’s not there. I pretend my desire to run back to him does not exist.

Your father. The way he spoke it, with the sharpness of disgust.

He knows things. I don’t know what they are, but they are things I don’t want to hear.

I get in my car, and rather than giving in to the endless sadness gnarling in my throat, I push it back and start the engine.

My fingers tremble on the steering wheel, and I hold tight to make them stop. Adrenaline pumps through my limbs. I close my eyes and let it wash through me, reveling in how my breath gusts in and out of my lungs.

The softness of the supple leather, the near-silent purr of the hybrid engine, the safety of its air-tightness—no sound can get inside—I am alone here. I don’t want to be.

I could go back to him.

Am I insane? Has my survival instinct failed?

You won’t escape me.

I shake his words from my ears, his face from my mind. I check the clock. It’s not that late. I could go shopping.

Spending the money, his money, is the only way I’m able to cope with the pain. It’s like if I keep using it, then he hasn’t left me, like he’s still here to take care of me when I need him. I can pretend I’m not twenty-one and parentless. I can pretend I’m young and light-hearted.

The fact that he’s gone . . . I can’t accept it.

Any more than the comfort I want to take from the strange man who’s threatening me with secrets. He knows the answers I’ve craved for years, but now I’d rather pretend my questions never existed.

* * *

I watch her walk—scurrying in those dainty shoes, on those too-cute legs that when spread across my hips would be . . .

I ignore it. Whatever that thought was, I won’t have it again.

When she’s lost to my sight, I walk to my truck. The dingy old Ford with a rust job for a coat of paint gets me to my temporary home on the beach.

I get my tent and cookstove from the bed of the truck and pitch camp between the brush and the sand. I’m not the only one camping on the beach, but I talk to no one. Since I left everything in Nashville and came here two weeks ago, I’ve spoken to as few people as possible.

I want no one. I need no one. My ever deepening plans for the little Miss Vandershall keep me company.

I light the stove, boil water for my meager meal and . . . look down at my empty fingers. I touched her.

She was in my hands.

So close.

She spoke to me.

I dump the dry ramen noodles in the boiling water and stir with the aluminum fork. For the first time in years, progress.

It should calm me, give me a moment’s peace in my relentless search for justice. But no matter how hard I try not to dwell on the dead, that moment’s peace does not come. The crimes her father committed against my family can’t go unpunished.

There is no peace for me. Only rage, only bitterness, only the drive for revenge that has robbed me of my life. It should exhaust me, I am exhausted. But it doesn’t mean I’ll rest. Calm is not something I’ll know or find.

The revulsion, the hatred burning through my veins is insatiable. That’s why I’m here. In this spot, the perfect spot to watch her.

I turn off the stove and eat, ignoring how sick I am of this tasteless food. The waves crash onto the shore, the salt in the air tickles my nose. There’s a moon reflected in the ocean. I glanced at it once, over a week ago.

My object of focus: her and her condo, her back terrace on the second floor with a view of the water. The interior light is still off. She isn’t home yet. I’ll stay awake until she is. My obsession is boundless.

I fantasize nightly about how I can do what I said, and ruin her life. I stay my feet, curbing the impulse to begin now: to break into her condo, to see what she’s made of, to find out how much of me and my darkness she can withstand before she succumbs and wastes to nothing.

I have one reason for living: the destruction of Penny Vandershall.

There is nothing else left in this world for me.