Careful What You Wish For

Chapter Thirteen

Slowly and hesitantly, Sophie details her encounter with the hooded person outside the pool. Talking about it starts to calm her frayed nerves and she stops trembling. Though she is loathe to admit it, having Evan in her house is also making her feel safer and less targeted. For his part, Evan sits quietly and listens, making all the right sounds and exclamations, watching her intently. If you had asked her before tonight if he were capable of such empathy and attentiveness she would have sighed dramatically and rolled her eyes.

Once she has finished, Sophie falls into the chair beside him. Exhausted.

"This happened just now?" Evan is incredulous. "Why didn't you go to the police?"

Sophie shrugs helplessly. "Don't they have enough to do?"

"Sophie..."

"What am I going to tell them?" Sophie interrupts him. "What can they possibly do about it?"

Evan looks at her as though he's never seen her before. "What if there's CCTV footage? Isn't that worth checking out?"

The idea hadn't occurred to Sophie at all. She feels immediately foolish. Another emotion Evan likes to elicit in her. Why is he so infuriating?

"Come on," he climbs off the kitchen stool and helps Sophie up by the arm. His touch is immediately noted. "I'll take you to the police station."

Sophie hesitates. She wants to argue. But Evan is so sure of himself all the time, and suddenly it feels like the most logical thing to do. Sophie tries not to dwell on the fact that she used to be sure of herself once upon a time as well. Before the boy in her kitchen destroyed her self-esteem. Although even as she is thinking this, she knows that it's not all on him. She let herself fall to pieces and couldn't find the strength to get up again.

She's the one who lost herself.

~

Evan takes immediate control at the police station on Moggill Road, relating the incident to the Officer in Charge with much more authority than Sophie thought he possessed. The OIC is an older gentleman, grey scattered through his hair and the skin on his face starting to sag under his eyes, but he is large and imposing and still looks as though he could chase someone down or make suspects cry. He listens carefully and once he has deemed their incident worth looking into further, they are seated in a room where he then asks Sophie to relay the episode in detail. Haltingly, and feeling somewhat foolish, Sophie runs through her night from the moment she left the pool.

The OIC takes detailed notes, and Sophie finds that she can't answer all his questions. Do you know who this person was? Was the person chasing you a man or a woman? How do you know? How tall were they? How fast were they running? What were they wearing? Did you see their face? Their hair? Their eyes? Is this the first time something like this has happened? Do you think this was random or were you the specific target..?

This is when it starts to get interesting. Sophie falters. Both the OIC and Evan notice immediately.

The OIC eyes her closely. A nervous butterfly escapes in her stomach. Here it was, it was all about the come out. Was she ready for this to be real?

"Do you think this person targeted you specifically?" He asks again.

"Maybe," Sophie says quietly.

"Why?"

Sophie blows out a long breath.

"Because someone has been leaving things for me to find," Sophie says. She sees the OIC's brow furrow in confusion. She glances at Evan and finds an identical, if not slightly more alarmed, reaction. "And a few weeks ago they broke into my house."

Sophie looks intently at the chipped wooden table in front of her as she says this. Fixating on a random collection of letters someone has scratched into the old tabletop, she tries to pretend she's not nervous about how they will react to this. Why is she nervous? For some absurd reason, she feels like this is her fault that this has happened.

"What?!" Evan's voice is loud in the small room.

"Why didn't you report this?" The OIC asks.

This is the question she has been worried about. "I don't know." She says honestly. "I think I was hoping it was a joke of some kind." Or that my no-good ex-boyfriend, who's here with me now, had staged some lavish display for forgiveness. She's not game to look at Evan.

"Start from the beginning," the OIC instructs.