Megan MIRANDA - The Perfect Stranger

I DROVE HOME, REMEMBERINGthe last time someone had spoken those words to me, about me.

Paige saying, There’s something not right with you. Because it was the easiest explanation. The one that absolved her from seeing the truth, from admitting she’d been played.

The article had been about to go to press. I had given Paige warning. For weeks I had warned her. First calling her up, telling her the truth. Years after I had moved out of their apartment.

“I’m investigating a suspicious death,” I’d said. “His name came up. I’m just giving you the heads-up.”

“I haven’t heard from you in years,” she’d said, “and now you want to talk to me? You left, and went totally off the radar, and now you’re investigating my husband?”

“I should’ve told you,” I said. “I should’ve told you years ago, the night before I left–”

“He told me,” she said. “He told me you were drunk, and when he went back for his medicine, you made a move on him. I already knew that.”

“No,” I said. “He. .” He what ? He moved my things, opened the doors, messed with my head. . Even after all this time, I wasn’t sure. I thought, but I had no proof. He tried to kill me . That was the thing I believed, deep inside. Waking up with the feeling of water in my lungs. The damp mildew smell of my pillow. After seeing the details of the girl who died at the college, Bridget LaCosta, overdose and drowning – I believed it even more. That maybe I had been his first attempt and it had not gone his way. That he’d had the perfect setup and had tried to stage it to fit, the story already in motion: We were out, she was drinking, she didn’t get the job she was expecting, she had to crash on our sofa. She wasn’t used to failure. We missed the warning signs. Me, finding his pills, taking so many, settling into the bath, slipping under.

He had failed. He hadn’t given me enough. Or I had fought back, ruined the scene. It went bad, one way or the other. Either way, I woke up in my bed, safe and secure – but another girl had not. And how many were there between then and now? It was too naive to think he wouldn’t have been active in the meantime. That he wouldn’t have been trying.

“He drugged me, Paige,” I said, begging her to see the rest.

“Stop calling me,” she said.

I didn’t. I couldn’t.

“It’s going to print,” I said. “It’s going to come out. I’m not using his name, but someone’s going to track it down.”

When I got the notice of the restraining order, I almost laughed.

And then the article came out. The next night I found myself behind their house, so curious – the scent of blood, my inevitable undoing. Wondering if he knew yet. If he knew it had been me.

I’d stood on my toes, could see only between the gap of the curtain, the amber light. I heard faint classical music humming in the background, from some room just out of sight. Stopping. Restarting. Like a record stuck on a loop.

I saw a glass on the table. Red wine. Just a trace left behind.

And I saw someone moving in the background, gently swaying. Spinning. I pressed my face closer to the window, my breath fogging up the glass. I saw his shoes first. Black. Polished. A few feet above the ground. Moving faintly back and forth, swinging from above.

I let out a gasp. A noise louder than that. But I was already backing away, running, flat-footed and desperate through the evening commuters. I didn’t stop until I made it into the T station, where I sat on the bench and let three trains go by before I’d gathered myself to go home.

It was Paige who found him, according to the police. Cut him down in a panic with a kitchen knife, the baby still strapped in the stroller in the parlor. She had just returned home with the baby from errands. It was the time she was always out, I knew from watching her. After work, she’d pick up their five-month-old son from day care, and they’d go to the store, or the mall, or they’d walk down through the Commons around the pond, or along Storrow Drive by the edge of the Charles.

It was why I’d picked right then to look. It was probably why he’d picked right then to do it.

I thought that was so cruel of him, even then. To leave it to Paige to discover.

I am the tie that binds. Not Emmy. Not Bethany. Me.

Me to Davis Cobb. Me to Emmy. My name in Bethany’s apartment, where it looked like she’d been attempting to slowly assume my identity.

Me to Theo. Me to the newspaper delivered to my door. Me to Aaron and Paige.

It’s no wonder the police pulled back to get a better view. It’s no wonder Kyle was skeptical. Look at what I’d left him with. Untraceable email accounts sending me proof that they were watching; a man calling me up at night; a woman with my face; a girl whom I could not prove existed. A dead body that I had identified beforehand. A history of inventing people – as if I were setting up a defense in advance.

I am the perfect mark.

I was back then, and I still am now. Loyal to a fault. Looking for the stories. An ear trained to pick up intrigue. Look at how you’ve channeled your weaknesses into strengths, my mother had said. The way I’m drawn to the morbid, the cop cars gathered on the side of the road, a streak of blood in the grass. How I throw myself into something, one hundred percent, until I achieve the desired outcome. Needing the construct of the story – a beginning, a middle, an end – to make sense of things.

I should’ve known, should’ve understood – that these strengths could be weaknesses instead. Looking for stories. Stepping too close, never putting up walls. An ear trained to pick up intrigue that you could feed me. A play on my emotions, an appeal to something baser inside. I welcomed Emmy into my life, into my head, with no boundaries. I thought we were protecting each other. I assumed we were on the same side from the start.

THE NEXT MORNING, ASI walked into school, I saw him in the front office through the glass windows. Davis Cobb, his head down, smiling at the secretary. He had some paperwork in his hand, probably allowing him to officially start working again. I pictured him on the other side of the wall, in another room; on the other side of a screen, his face glowing as his thick fingers typed out a poem about me and a man I’d brought home.

What more did he know?

I waited outside the back entrance of the front office near the classroom wings, waited for him to come out the locked door, so I might catch him off guard, unplanned. The door flew open, and there he was, towering over me, looking somewhere beyond.

“I need to talk to you,” I said, stepping directly into his path.

Davis’s eyes went wide. I had forgotten that they were blue. I had forgotten all the pieces that made him real – a real person, a real threat. He backed away, hands out in defense, as if our roles were reversed. His eyes shifted from side to side down the empty halls. “No,” he said.

I stepped closer. “You’ve seen her. My roommate. You’ve seen her. I just need to know.” I heard myself, felt the urgency, the desperation, could do nothing to stop it. “You’ve been watching.” If nobody could prove she existed, it all circled back to me.

“I don’t watch you,” he said, taking another step back until he was practically pressed up against the front office door. He had his hand on the knob, but it had locked behind him, and he was stuck with me now. “I don’t. I never did. I told them that.”

In my head, I heard his voice dropped low to a whisper, his breath in the phone from somewhere outside. The things he said and knew. “But in the emails. .”