Page 19 of When He Calls

7:38. Movement at the end of the block. Bean first, pulling ahead, then the gray hoodie. They come up the sidewalk and I watch them approach. Bean's nose is down. His hood is still up. His pace is steady, the post-walk calm where his body has done its minimum exposure and survived and the nervous system is granting him a window of functional peace before the next sensor goes off.

They pass my car fifteen feet away. He doesn't look. He never looks at the parked cars because the parked cars are scenery and scenery doesn't register when you're managing a nervous system that's overallocated to threat detection. The decorations get all his attention. The fog machines, the skeletons, the motion sensors. The cars get none. I could be parked here every morning for the rest of October and he would walk past me fifteen feet away and never once turn his head.

This is the gap. The enormous, exploitable gap in his threat map. He's watching for the wrong danger. His entire defense system is oriented toward plastic skulls and LED lights and the four-second laugh of a motion-activated skeleton on Ellis's lawn, and the actual threat is in a gray sedan with fogged windows.

He goes inside in a hurry and the lobby door closes. I watch him until he disappears around the corner to head upstairs to his unit.

My phone buzzes. Mark. Ridiculous morning. You want to come in early? Double time.

I type back: Give me an hour.

The hour isn't for preparation. The hour is for the drive to the coffee shop on Fourth, the one three miles from his neighborhood, where the barista knows my order and the wifi is strong enough to hold a search. I've been running searches for two days. Not on him. I have everything I need on him. The searches are on whatever else I can find about him, and right now my focus is the books he’s edited because I am nothing if not thorough.

He takes on three to four manuscripts per quarter. The current project is a vineyard romance by an author who self-publishes under P.L. Vyne. I bought all three of her backlist titles. The prose is competent, commercial, the kind of writing that sells with the right cover and the right keywords. She’s not a great writer. She's a working writer with a good editor. The acknowledgments in her last book thank him by name. To Milo, who always finds the spine.

His hands on that manuscript. His brain inside that story. The quiet, focused version of him that exists during the day, the version that isn't afraid. The version that sits at the desk and does the work. The contrast between that version and the midnight version, the bathroom-floor version, the version whose legs lock at the sight of fog. That contrast is the thing that keeps me parked on his street at seven in the morning with his voice in my ears.

He contains both. The editor who finds the spine. The man who can't walk past a plastic skeleton. Both of them in one body.

Both of them mine.

And knowing more about who he is, what he enjoys, what brings him peace, brings me that much closer to winning him over when the time comes.

And the humor. The way he swears and apologizes in the same breath, like he's sorry for taking up the air. It's the most honest thing about him, and it's what keeps me on the line long after the protocol says I should let him go.

Tonight I'll ask about the novel. The protagonist's spine. What it means to find the structure under a messy draft. The question will be answered because it treats him as the editor, not the caller. The editor is the version of himself he trusts. When I speak to that version, it leans toward me the way his plants on the sill lean toward the glass every morning when the blinds go up.

He doesn't realize every question I ask is rewiring his fear around me.

The car starts and the window defrosts. His block recedes in the rearview. Fifteen minutes to the coffee shop and then to work.

I pull up the recording one more time. The last thirty seconds, where the conversation winds down and his voice gets quieter, smaller, the reluctance to hang up obvious in the spacing of his words. The sentences slow. The pauses stretch.

He doesn't want the call to end.

Same time tomorrow?

His voice, asking. The want is in the half-second delay before tomorrow, where his voice lifts slightly, the upward inflection of a question that isn't sure of its answer even though the answer hasn't changed in six nights.

Same time tomorrow.

Nine days until Halloween.

The notebook has five entries. Tonight will make six.

Hours and hours of a man building a relationship with someone who doesn't exist. The operator on the line. The professional. The voice that says you have me and means it the way a doctor means you're in good hands. That person isn't real. That person is a construction, a character, a performance calibrated to his specific damage and maintained with the same discipline I bring to every call, except this time the discipline isn't in service of his recovery. It's in service of the door.

The door that he stands behind that keeps us apart.

Every call opens it wider. Every night, the voice he trusts says his name. The trust deepens. The name becomes mine. Becomes the thing I own. The sound that means safety in his nervous system. By Halloween the door will be open. I will walk through it. His body will let me because his body has been trained to believe that my presence is the opposite of danger.

He will feel nothing but safety when he looks at me.

And that is the goal…

To make him mine.

And he will be mine.