“Somewhere safe. Somewhere he won’t find me. I’ll tell you eventually, but not yet. I need time to just be me without anyone knowing where I am.”
She understood. Of course she did.
“Call me once a week so I know you’re alive. That’s all I ask.”
“I will. I promise.”
Everything was fine for about three weeks. I was settling into my routine. Work. Hiking on weekends. Slowly furnishing my apartment with secondhand finds. I had even made friends with my neighbor, an art student named Riley who played guitar badly but with enormous enthusiasm.
Then one Tuesday, Jessica from work found me during lunch break. Her face was tight with concern.
“Hey. Weird question. Do you know someone named Frank?”
My stomach dropped.
“Why?”
She pulled out her phone and showed me a photo someone had taken in our office lobby. A man in a bank uniform talking to reception. I recognized him immediately, even from the back.
“He came by this morning claiming to be your husband. Said there was a family emergency and he needed your contact information. Security turned him away, but he was asking a lot of questions. Taking photos of the building.”
The pad thai I had eaten for lunch turned to lead in my stomach.
“What kind of questions?”
“What floor you worked on. What time you usually arrived. If you’d mentioned where you lived.”
Jessica’s expression darkened.
“Our receptionist got weird vibes and called security. Is this guy stalking you?”
I set my coffee down carefully.
“We’re divorcing. I left him, and he’s not handling it well.”
“Should we be worried? Do you need us to flag him in our security system?”
“Yes, please. And Jessica, if he comes back, don’t tell him anything. Don’t even confirm I work here.”
She squeezed my shoulder.
“Already done. Catherine’s been notified too. We take this stuff seriously.”
That evening, I sat in my apartment trying to figure out how Frank had found my workplace. I had been careful. No social media updates. No forwarding address. No obvious paper trail.
Then it hit me.
My debit card.
I had been using it at the coffee shop near my office, at the grocery store two blocks away, at the Thai place I ordered from twice a week. Frank was a bank manager. He had access to transaction systems.
He was tracking my purchases.
The realization made me feel violated all over again. It wasn’t enough that he had humiliated me, used me, discarded me. Now he was using his professional access to hunt me down like I was some kind of asset he had misplaced.
I opened a new account at a different bank the next morning, transferred every cent, and closed the old account completely. Then I called the lawyer whose card Catherine had given me during my first week, just in case.
“Michelle Reeves,” the voice answered on the second ring. “Reeves Law. How can I help you?”
“My ex-husband is using his position as a bank manager to track my debit card transactions. He showed up at my workplace. Is that legal?”
Her voice sharpened instantly.
“No. That’s called a data privacy violation, and it’s a federal offense. How certain are you that’s what he’s doing?”
“Very certain. He’s a manager at First National. I’ve changed banks, but I need to know what else I can do.”
“Document everything. Every time he contacts you or shows up somewhere. Every call, every message, every sighting. We’ll need all of that for a restraining order.” She paused. “And Elizabeth? What he’s doing isn’t just creepy. It’s criminal. We’re going to stop him.”
I hung up and looked around my small studio apartment, my safe space, my fresh start. Frank had taken eight years of my life. He had taken my savings, my dreams, my sense of self-worth. But he wasn’t taking this. He wasn’t taking my future.
I pulled out my phone and started documenting everything, starting with the day he handed me those divorce papers and called me dead weight.
Frank wanted to find me.
Fine.
Let him find out what happens when dead weight finally stops carrying you and starts fighting back.
The documentation took me three days to complete. Every voicemail Frank had left on Diane’s phone. Every text to Marcus. Screenshots of my closed bank account with timestamps showing when I drained my half. Photos Jessica had taken of him in our lobby before security turned him away. Michelle Reeves’s contact information sat in my phone like a safety net I hoped I wouldn’t need. But documenting Frank’s stalking meant reliving it, and by the third day I was exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.
Saturday morning, I walked to the bookstore coffee shop on Pine Street, the one place in Seattle that had become mine. Not mine in Frank’s sense. Not somewhere I went because I had to. Just mine. I ordered my usual overpriced latte and found my spot by the window where I could watch the rain and pretend to read while actually just existing without purpose or pressure.
The shop was more crowded than usual. Every table was full, people hunched over laptops or books or conversations that looked important.
“Excuse me. Is this seat taken?”
