Chance had never been a fan of scary movies. Link had tried to get him in the theatres for several years when he was a teenager around Halloween. He said that if Chance could take on rival gangs and the horrors of the streets, he could very easily see some remake of a remake of a 1980s movie with obviously fake blood and some blonde chick running around with obnoxiously large breasts.
But it was even worse when it seemed his life was turning into a horror movie.
Hannah stayed on the phone with him the entire time she drove back. They talked aimlessly about what they’d have for dinner that night and plans for the weekend and anything to pretend that something incredibly horrifying hadn’t just happened to her at the store. He didn’t tell her that, while they were on the phone, he was readying the pistol he kept in the drawer next to his side of the bed and making sure his reserve ammo was somewhere he could reach on short notice. He didn’t want to scare her, but he also didn’t want to take any chances.
She got home and they locked the doors and shut the blinds and lived as shut-ins the rest of the day.
“I wanted to get you a gift,” she said when he asked why she’d gone out so early.
“A gift?”
She turned red and shrugged. “I just wanted to have something nice for you. You’ve been so good lately and we’ve been so—I just wanted to give you something too.”
He gave her a soft smile and came to kneel down in front of her, placing his hands on her belly and splaying out his palms. He felt the heat of her body and imagined that, in several months, he’d be doing this again to the feeling of a baby foot kicking him back. He smiled and held her gaze. She was blushing hard and couldn’t see him to hold his eye contact.
“You don’t need to get me anything,” he said. “This is my gift. I got you that ring because I wanted you to have the best you possibly could. It was me paying you back.”
She smiled at that. They looked at each other in the dim and the quiet of the darkened living room. The TV was off, the blinds were drawn, the hum of the appliances filled the air. Everything was still and it was the last moment of peace they had for a very long time thereafter. They savored it by holding each other on the couch and listening to the sounds of their heartbeats and breathing as they waited patiently for whatever was going to happen to happen.
But nothing came. There was no crash outside, no sound of shattering glass. There was nothing to indicate anyone was hovering nearby or waiting to pounce. They were alone in their lakeside home and alone in their living room. They were safe, though they certainly didn’t feel it. Nothing about that day felt safe or calm and Chance wanted nothing more than to take Hannah and run far, far away. But he wasn’t going to let Ben win so easily. This was his home, and his life, and his fiancée, and his child. He was going to defend them to the last breath and take Ben down with him if he had to.
It was the end of their honeymoon phase, that afternoon. It wasn’t because they finally got into their first fight or disagreed over dinner, but because a madman might be stalking them. It was because something or someone dangerous was waiting a little too close for comfort and they let the tension get to them. What ensued was going to be one of the most trying times Chance had ever endured and one of the darkest times.
Maybe if he had watched those horror movies with Link as a kid, he’d be able to avoid this now.
***
It started with the footprints. It had been several days since the mall incident and they hadn’t mentioned it since. They hadn’t even told the rest of the gang or Chance’s family. It didn’t seem important. They had a momentary time of fear and now it was over and they could move forward with their plans. But the first sign of trouble had come the night they decided to actually sit down and plan out the wedding.
“I don’t care about the date,” Chance yawned. They’d been staring at the calendar and possible venues for over an hour. “I just want to marry you. Hell, I’ll do it right now in the living room with a minister and a couple of randoms off the street as witnesses.”
“I’m flattered and that’s romantic,” Hannah said, kissing his temple. “But I’ve dreamed of my wedding since I was twelve and you’re not going to take the fairy tale dream away from me.”
“If you dreamed about it since you were twelve, don’t you have your own plans for it already set up?”
“I want to make plans with you. This is the first thing we’re doing together. It’s important.”
He had to give her that. Planning a wedding was like the training wheels of a marriage. You had to get through it. You learned all about compromise and partnership while you fought over place settings and colors. Of course, Chance couldn’t really bring himself to care that much about those things enough to argue with her. He tried though. For her sake he would try to care enough to fight with her about their wedding options.
It made her giggle, the way he overly pretended to care. But the giggles stopped when she went to deposit the pizza box in the trash outside and desperately called for Chance. He took off running and came to her side to find her perfectly fine but staring, deathly pale off into the yard.
“What is it?” he asked, looking around for whatever it was she was seeing.
She pointed. Then he saw it. There were footprints in the mud from the rain that had fallen earlier that day. They were large, the kind that fit a man’s boot. Chance, at first, wanted to believe they were his. But they hadn’t gone out all day and these were a little fresh to be from any time longer than a few hours ago. He felt a chill travel from the very base of his spin to the top where it exploded into pure paranoia at the base of his skull.
Someone had been near their home. And that wasn’t the end of it.
***
Chance didn’t know if things were actually escalating from there or he was just becoming more and more attuned to finding the dangerous things that were hiding around every corner of his house. The next strange occurrence was a few days later. They’d gone out together to window shop for tuxes for the groomsmen to wear. In this Chance did have a bit of an opinion. But their banter was cut short when they got home and found that something just wasn’t quite right.
The kitchen chair had been moved. Hannah always made a point to push them in before they left because she didn’t want to get in the habit of leaving them out in case the baby decided to take an adventurous climb. So when they came home to find one sitting in the middle of the kitchen, it seemed more than a little weird. And then the implications made Chance’s blood run cold.
They didn’t speak of it out loud. Neither one of them mentioned what they were really thinking. If they voiced their fears then it would become too real. It would be too much. So they stayed quiet about it, if a little on edge.
It happened again a few days later. This time it was the TV remote which seemed to have been hidden on the top of the entertainment center. It felt like something out of a haunted house movie but Chance knew it was so much more dangerous than all of that. They were being watched. And it was beginning to feel like they were being toyed with. Chance had a feeling he knew exactly who was behind it all and his blood began boil and boil more and more.
The biggest strike came when he noticed something odd poking out from between a stack of books on the shelf. It was small, round, and seemed to have something reflective on the front. He walked over, bent down, and felt himself nearly lose it when he realized what he was looking at.
It was a camera. It was small and it was discrete and that made it all the worse. Someone had planted a camera in his home. Someone was spying on him and Hannah. He tore through the rest of the book shelf, looking for more. He detached light fixtures and found a small, round disk that he recognized immediately as a microphone. Their house had been bugged.
Someone had come into their home and planted things to spy on them with. Someone had been watching them. For how long? He suddenly felt sick to his stomach. He wanted to bleach the whole house at the thought of some foreign person being in there without them knowing. Then a horrible thought crossed his mind. He made his way up to the nursery. He pushed the door open gently and closed it behind him, not want to alert Hannah.
Then he set to work tearing the place apart until he found a camera there too. Someone was going to spy on his child. That meant whoever did this knew Hannah was pregnant. This was, possibly, the worst thing that could have happened.
Ben knew Hannah was pregnant, he knew where they lived, and he’d been in their house. And he’d known for a while now. Chance was beginning to feel himself slowly lose control over the situation as sweat broke out on the crown of his head. His family was in danger.