Page 12 of Beyond Protection
"Good ones."
I pulled out my phone. Started a voice memo. "Tighter perimeter tomorrow. Full security assessment of this house before breakfast. I'll need to know every entry point, every window lock, every neighbor with a clear sight line to the front door. Cameras installed by tomorrow night—motion-activated, cloud backup, something they can't disable if they get close."
Michael nodded. "Whatever you need."
I stopped the recording. "The sedan outside. You get a visual on the driver?"
"No. The windows were foggy. Could be anyone."
"Could be the stalker."
"Yeah."
Outside, the rain intensified. Water rushing through gutters, drumming against windows. The sound should have been comforting, but instead felt like static—covering other noises, masking footsteps, and making everything harder to hear.
"I should let you get some sleep," Michael said. "You'll meet Mac in the morning. He'll probably try to act like this isn't rattling him. He's good at that."
Michael drained his cup and set it in the sink. "Just—when you meet him. When you see what he does with his face, his voice, and everything, remember it's armor. Remember there's a scared twenty-seven-year-old under there who's really good at pretending he's got this handled."
I thought about the footsteps. The pacing. The restlessness of someone who couldn't settle because settling meant being still,and being still meant thinking about the fact that somewhere out there, a stranger had been watching him for eighteen months.
"I'll remember," I said.
Michael looked at me for a long moment. Whatever he saw made him nod.
"Den's downstairs. Fold-out's already made up. Get some sleep if you can."
He left.
I stood in the kitchen listening to the house settle around me. The refrigerator cycling on with a mechanical wheeze. The furnace kicking in. Somewhere upstairs, a pipe knocked twice and went quiet.
The house breathed with the rhythm of a family. Thirty years of McCabes coming through that front door, hanging jackets on the same hooks, making coffee at dawn, and leaving lights on for whoever came home last. It smelled like safety built one day at a time.
I'd been living in places with no heartbeat. Sterile hotel rooms and my Portland apartment with its blank walls and empty refrigerator. No morning routine that required me to show up.
I'd dated in Portland. Brief things. A bartender for three weeks. A grad student for two months. Both ended the same way. They asked multiple times if they could leave a toothbrush, and I made excuses until they stopped asking.
The truth was simple: I couldn't let anyone close enough to witness me failing again. Couldn't risk someone depending on me when I knew—bone-deep, blood-certain—that I might hesitate at the crucial moment.
Better to live alone than to be responsible for someone else's hope.
For my apartment, I'd chosen the most anonymous building I could find. Concrete and glass, no shared walls, and no neighbors who'd notice when I didn't come home for days.I'd furnished it with the minimum required to function—bed, couch, coffee maker. Nothing that suggested permanence. Nothing that would hurt to leave behind.
I'd built a life designed for no one to miss me when I left.
The McCabe den was in the basement. Wood paneling from the seventies, a fold-out couch that had seen better decades, and one small window that looked out at ground level. Vulnerable.
I sat on the edge of the converted bed and stared at the rain hitting the small window. Cued up my headphones—Coltrane,A Love Supreme. The familiar progression of saxophone and piano, searching for transcendence through discipline and repetition.
It didn't help.
Nothing helped except work. Taking another job and another and another until the jobs blurred together, and I could pretend I was protecting people instead of running from the one person I'd failed to protect.
Kyra Mendez.
The memories always came back, whether I wanted them to or not.
Twenty-nine years old. Investigative journalist. Death threats from a corrupt city councilman she'd exposed. She'd hired me through a personal recommendation—someone who'd worked with me before the failure, when I still had a reputation for seeing threats before they materialized.
