Page 18 of The Cadence

I got more and more annoyed the more I read.

It was ridiculous that they bothered to write about me, and at first I started crafting responses.

“No, I don’t dress up for work and why would you care what I wear anyway?

Leave me alone!” I typed angrily. “I have a job because I’m no leach, and Will’s finances are none of y’all’s business! Leave him alone too!”

I looked at the words, corrected some misspellings, and then deleted everything.

It was just more grist, after all. I didn’t need to provide that for them…

and suddenly, I understood why Will got upset when he heard stories about his family, true or not, and why he hadn’t wanted me to talk about sleeping in my car.

Because it was nobody’s business, that was why!

“I just want to say sorry. Again,” I wrote to him. “I’m sorry that I didn’t answer you and made you worried enough to call the police and I’m also sorry that I opened my mouth about our personal history. I won’t do that anymore.” He was in his meeting, and I didn’t expect an answer.

But we did talk more when he got home from that island the next day. There were a few things to go over.

“The woman who helped Jory Morin with his house is coming to talk about decorating this place,” Will mentioned as he emptied his bag into his laundry baskets.

As I’d suspected, there was an entire room devoted to dirty clothes here.

“We can both talk to her about what we like and what we think the house needs.”

“Ok,” I said. I thought that I wouldn’t have a lot to add to the conversation, but I was happy to help out.

“Also, I’m thinking of putting in security cameras.”

“To keep an eye on me?” I asked. I trailed after him into the hallway.

“To keep an eye on everything when I’m away. I spend a lot of time in other cities and I need to have my mind on my job. I understand that you’re capable—”

“No, I understand, too.” I thought about Kirsten creeping up and down this street, watching.

He zipped up his empty suitcase and carefully stored it in a cabinet under the stairs. “I had a stalker,” he mentioned.

“What?” Will started walking toward the kitchen and I followed again. “A stalker?” I repeated, and again felt guilty.

“It started in college,” he said. “There was a woman who kept posting about me, just normal stuff at first but it got strange, slightly sexual and like…like she thought that we had some kind of relationship. Then she started showing up places, too, and I knew because she would call hello to me, as if we knew each other. She’d be in front of my apartment building and outside of the lecture halls when I had class.

At first, I just thought she was a fan with too much time on her hands, but then it started to get even weirder.

” He sat on one of the new bar stools but stopped talking.

“You can’t leave it like that! What happened?” I slid into the seat next to him.

“She got more intrusive,” he answered, and shook his head when I poked his arm. “Ok, ok. Somehow, she let herself into my apartment.”

“You mean that she broke in?”

“She did, and then she got arrested. It didn’t slow her down much and I got a restraining order. She was arrested a few more times, though, and it went on until about three years ago.”

“How did you make it stop?” I wondered.

“She died.”

I stared.“Oh.”

“Don’t ask me if I had something to do with that, because I didn’t,” he said, and I told him of course not.

“It’s still something I think about,” he continued.

“I still find myself looking over my shoulder a lot. I never thought that she’d be able to physically overpower me, but she could have had a weapon.

More than that, the idea that she was watching made me feel… ”

“Scared?” I prompted, when he stopped again.

“No,” Will disagreed. “I felt like I needed more security.”

“What was the emotion you had?

He squinted. “I knew that I should be more aware of my surroundings. That’s why I’m going to have the cameras installed. I’m not doing it because I think you’re untrustworthy or because I want to stalk you.”

“I don’t mind the cameras. It turns out that I’ve been getting some local attention, and another person might turn weird, too,” I explained. I showed him one of the pictures of me at the grocery store.

“What the hell does this say?” he demanded, and he sounded very angry. “You need more makeup? No, you don’t. You were at work, not a club.”

“Exactly!” I agreed. “Am I supposed to get done up for that? Also, no one ever says that you need more makeup.” I knew that it was true, since I’d been looking at what people said about him. They didn’t mention makeup, but there was a lot that was critical that I didn’t like at all.

“You shouldn’t read that crap,” he advised. “I never do.” But then he moved through the comments under the other posts, and he got furious again as, yes, he read them. “This is ridiculous! It says that you waited for years for me to come back and find you, like you’re Sleeping goddamn Beauty.”

“Wow,” I said. “Wow, someone wrote that I was waiting around for you for seven years? That’s so silly. We didn’t even think about each other for all that time.”

“That’s not true.”

“Oh?” The word had come out a little higher than my normal tone.

“Whenever I went home and drove by our high school, I remembered how you hadn’t known about multiplication,” he explained.

“Oh,” I repeated. “Right, yes. I was very bad at math.”

“No, you just hadn’t learned it yet. I’m heading to bed.” He got up and walked me to the guest cottage first, though, and I watched the light in his room come on after he left me. It stayed on for a while and when I fell asleep, he hadn’t yet turned it off.

The next day, I was in the garage with my latest furniture project when a huge SUV pulled up, and a very small woman leaped out of the driver’s side. “Are you Calla?” she called, and I immediately bristled. Was this another stalker?

“Who wants to know?” I yelled back.

“I’m Annie Whitaker-Gassman,” she answered.

“I’m actually Ana?s, but no one called me that except my parents.

And my brother still does sometimes when he’s mad at me.

My kids think it sounds like ‘anus’ and that’s hilarious to them.

” As she spoke, she was unloading a bag from her back seat and then walking fast over to me.

“I’ve always loved this place! One thing I do, which I know is a little strange, is keep track of houses. ”

So she was a stalker. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” I said. I took two steps back. “Now.”

“Oh, shoot! Is this a bad time? I didn’t see any messages about changing the appointment, but I never check my phone while I drive. I have a little vision issue and I don’t need to make things worse.”

I didn’t pay attention to what she said after “appointment.” “Hold up. You’re here to do the decorating stuff for Will’s house?”

She nodded, smiling. “I do that, and I also supervise renovations if that’s what you’re looking for. I stage for sales, too, so if Bodine gets traded, I can help you guys out. Are you Calla? He told me about you.”

“Why are you talking about a trade? And what do you know about me?”

Before she could answer those questions, Will came out of the house and they started talking.

This Ana?s, or Annie, seemed like a very friendly person, although her organizational skills made me a little nervous.

Three times during the five minutes that we talked in the driveway, she got messages from her children and on each occasion, she broke away from our conversation.

“I have six kids,” she explained, smiling again. “There’s always something going on. That’s why it’s so important that I also have a great collaborator.”

“Your husband?” I asked, looking at the giant emerald ring on the third finger of her left hand.

“What? Oh, you mean Neil! Yes, he’s amazing, but I mean my collaborator at the design firm, Remy. Now she and Tobin are having their third…”

She continued on about her children, her husband, her business partner, and that woman’s family as we toured the house, and the whole time she also got texts from various people and wrote furiously on a legal pad she carried.

She asked both me and Will a million questions and darted around with a tape measure as well, and I had no idea what was going to come of this.

Annie stopped in front of the chest of drawers, the only piece of furniture in one of the guest bedrooms. “Did you paint this?” she asked me. “It looks like the bedside table you were working on in the garage. I recognize this blue.” She pointed at one of the stripes.

She was more attentive than I realized, then. “I got that for free and worked on it some,” I answered.

“She fixed the whole thing and then painted it. Calla is really artistic,” Will filled in, and I turned to smile at him.

“I can see that,” Annie answered. “Do you mind if I take a picture?”

“No,” I said, although I couldn’t think of why she’d have wanted to. Then we moved on to several more rooms and she finally told us that she had enough to start on.

“I’ll send you both a detailed proposal…wait a minute, Calla, I don’t think I have your contact information.”

“Mine?” I asked. She nodded briskly so I gave it to her, watching Will as I did. He didn’t seem to have an issue with that.

She flew off in her giant car and he had to go, too, so I was left standing in the garage again. I picked up a brush and the blue paint I’d mixed, but then I still just squinted after the cars, thinking.