Chapter 16 - Still Out There
I did not go back to the apartment we had shared.
My parents took me home to their quiet neighborhood, and I began, slowly and badly, to try to feel safe again — and I could not, because the truth was that I was not yet safe.
My mother started sleeping with her phone under her pillow.
My father installed cameras and checked them every half hour.
I flinched at strangers on the sidewalk and checked over my shoulder walking to my own car.
Because Samuel was still out there, and I was not the kind of loose end a man like that leaves alone.
A week later, a bouquet of white roses appeared on my parents’ porch, and tucked into the stems was a photograph of me leaving the courthouse, and on the back of it, in hand: Did you really think you had won? The lead investigator confirmed what my whole body already knew.
Samuel was tracking me.
I will not spend long on the frightening weeks that followed, because they resolved, and because dwelling on fear I have since walked out of gives it a power it no longer deserves.
It is enough to say that the threat was real, and that the law, in the end, closed around Samuel too — but not before Christopher, of all people, forced the ending.
Samuel, it turned out, had kept duplicate physical copies of everything, and was using them to try to extort his own escape: cash, papers, a way across the border, in exchange for not putting the whole ugly archive online.
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And Christopher, injured and disgraced and facing prison, decided he was going to be the one to stop him.
It was the first genuinely protective thing he had done in the entire story, and it came, like all his good instincts, far too late to save anything but a fragment of his own soul.
