Chapter Text
By the third morning, I knew I wasn’t making it up.
That sounds dramatic, I know. People love saying they “just knew” something, as though instinct is some clean little bell that rings in your ear. Mine was uglier than that. More like a bad smell under a door. Faint at first, easy to blame on something else, then suddenly everywhere.
The girl in the yellow coat got on at Milton every morning and stood near the middle doors with her headphones in. She had a canvas tote bag with some half-peeled bookstore logo on it, and she always held her phone too close to her face. Short nails. Brown hair. Little silver hoops in her ears. I noticed these things because I am nosy, apparently, though I would have called myself observant before all this. Observant sounds respectable. Nosy sounds like someone peering through blinds while pretending to water a fern.
He noticed her too. That was the problem.
He boarded one stop after her. Same carriage. Same side. He wore dark clothes, office clothes mostly, and carried himself with that city man blandness that makes a person hard to remember afterwards. He looked forgettable. Dark hair, maybe thirty-five, clean jaw, no wedding ring. A watch with a brown leather strap. Black umbrella. If I had to pick him out of a lineup back then, I probably could have done it, but only because I had already started storing him away in the wrong part of my brain.
At first, I thought he knew her. Ex-boyfriend maybe. Coworker. Tutor. Brother’s friend. Some boring explanation with a tax file number and a shared group chat. Then I saw how he watched. He didn’t stare like drunk men do outside pubs, all chin and appetite. He studied her in pieces. Her reflection in the train window. The tilt of her head when announcements crackled overhead. The route her eyes took when she checked the carriage before getting off. He made it look casual, which somehow made it worse. A man pretending to look nowhere is usually looking exactly where he means to.
The first two days I told myself to mind my own business. Brisbane trains are full of odd little rituals. The same woman eating yoghurt on the 7am train every morning. The old bloke who says “bloody hell” under his breath every time the doors beep because it wakes him from his scheduled nap on the train. The schoolboys slapping each other’s backpacks. You see people enough and your brain starts knitting nonsense. Humans are pattern-hungry animals. Give us three dots and we’ll draw a monster.
On the third day, the monster moved.
The girl in the yellow coat got off at Central. He followed. So did I.
I wish I could dress that up better. I’d like to say courage lifted me from my seat, or some noble civic duty took hold of my ankle and dragged me through the doors. Really, I panicked. The warning bells went off, rather I just walked into a three-day-old crime scene, the doors began to close, and I slipped out so fast my bag caught on the rubber seal. Very elegant. Nearly lost a shoulder.
The platform was jammed with commuters, all elbows and wet umbrellas and that sour morning breath people pretend coffee fixes. She moved through them easily. He kept back a few metres, never close enough to make a scene and never distant enough to lose her. That was when the putrid stench hit me, turning my stomach instantly and becoming a whole alarm system.
She went up the escalator. He went up after her. I stayed behind him.
At the top, she turned toward the main exit and paused to check her phone. He stopped at a vending machine. I pretended to search my bag, digging through receipts and old lip balm while watching from under my hair like a complete lunatic. She started walking again. He followed. And then, against every scrap of common sense I possessed, I followed him.
Outside, the city had been rinsed grey, the skyline blurred behind a veil of steady rain. Buses sighed at the curb as they pulled up. White collar workers marched through drizzle with their heads down. Somewhere nearby someone was swearing at a parking meter. The girl crossed Ann Street, cut past a café, and stepped into the queue. He stopped across the road beneath an awning.
I stood beside a pole plastered with old gig posters and tried to look like I belonged there. I did not. I looked like a damp idiot with a handbag.
For seven minutes, nothing happened.
She ordered coffee. She tapped her card. She smiled at the barista. He watched through the café window with his hands in his coat pockets. That should have been enough. I could have walked in and said something. Excuse me, sorry, there’s a man following you. Maybe I’m wrong, but I thought you should know. Simple. Awkward, sure, but awkwardness has never killed anyone. Silence has.
I didn’t do it.
She left through the side door and disappeared into the mess of students heading toward the university buildings. He waited until she was gone. Then he turned the opposite way. And I, winner of absolutely no survival awards, followed him instead.
I have replayed that choice so many times it has worn grooves in me. Why him? Why not her? Concern should move toward the person in danger, shouldn’t it? That’s the decent direction. That’s what a normal woman does. She warns the girl, calls someone, gets help, goes home and feels shaken but righteous.
At the time, I told myself I needed to know more. Needed proof. A photo, maybe. A pattern. Some piece of evidence heavier than a bad inkling. The police don’t exactly hand out medals for “stalker vibes on the 7am train.” Besides, what would I say? Hello officer, there’s a man in a coat using his eyes incorrectly.
So I followed.
He moved through the city as if he had no particular destination, which irritated me more than it should have. He bought a black coffee from a cart near King George Square and didn’t bother to add sugar. I may have physically recoiled. He stood outside a closed tailor’s shop and checked his phone. He went into a second-hand bookstore, spent nearly twenty minutes in the true crime section, because of course he did, and bought nothing. I watched from across the aisle with a copy of some celebrity memoir open upside down in my hands.
A woman brushed past me and apologised. I returned the apology on instinct. A polite reflex, I’ll call it.
He left the shop. I trailed him down the street, across two crossings, past a chemist, past a bakery with fogged glass and cinnamon smell leaking out of it. He never looked back. That was the hook.
He never looked back.
A guilty man checks. A nervous man checks. Even an ordinary man, if he feels someone behind him for long enough, will glance over his shoulder eventually. He didn’t. He walked as if the world behind him had already been accounted for.
I went home that afternoon with wet socks and a headache. By dinner, I had convinced myself I’d done a good thing. By midnight, I was thinking about his hands.
Nothing filthy. Nothing romantic. Just the shape of them. Long fingers. Clean nails. A faint scar near the base of his thumb. I kept seeing the way he held his coffee cup, steady and loose, as if nothing in the world had ever startled him.
The next morning, I arrived at the station fifteen minutes early. I told myself I wanted to check on the girl. Let’s call it that.
She wasn’t there at first. The platform filled slowly with the normal crowd. My gaze swept across the commuters, searching for any sign of him. No. Her. I was looking for her. A school kid dropped a water bottle and chased it with one shoe untied. A woman in activewear argued with someone on speakerphone. The departure board flickered, delayed by three minutes, then two. Then he appeared.
A stupid little warmth opened in my chest. There you are. I hated myself for thinking it.
He stood near the same pillar as always. Brown watch strap. Dark coat. Damp hair from the rain. He looked ordinary enough that nobody else bothered to look twice, and yet I felt as though every fluorescent light in the station had turned toward him.
That was when it began properly.
The following days blurred into a private map. His routines became little landmarks I carried around inside me. Third carriage from the front. Coffee with no sugar. Still made me cringe. Messenger bag on Mondays and Thursdays. No bag on Fridays. He avoided standing near loud groups. He watched reflections. Shop windows, train glass, puddles in the gutter after rain.
That detail should have scared me off. I became careful instead. I changed where I stood. Changed carriages. Changed shoes once because the soles clicked too sharply on tile. I tucked my hair into my coat. Bought sunglasses that I looked ridiculous in. Once, and I still cringe thinking about it, I bought a cap from a tourist shop because I had seen people do that in movies. It said BRISBANE in block letters across the front. Subtle as a marching band.
This is where I’d like to say obsession crept up on me. Truthfully, it may have already moved in and simply started unpacking.
It made itself tea in my kitchen. It sat on the end of my bed while I tried to sleep. It rode with me to work and perched on my shoulder during customer complaints about service delays and tyre quotes. People spoke and I nodded while some other part of me wondered where he was. Whether he was watching someone. Whether he had noticed me.
Especially that. Whether he had noticed me. Because eventually, the girl in the yellow coat became less important.
There. I said it.
She still appeared some mornings, bright and unaware, and I still felt that stab of worry when his attention found her. But something in me had tilted. My concern had grown a second mouth, and that mouth was hungry for him. I wanted to know what he was. I wanted to know what he knew. I wanted, Dog help me, to be included in whatever dark little arithmetic he carried behind his eyes.
That is not a sane thing to admit. Even now, writing it feels like touching a bruise to see if it still hurts. But sanity is easier in hindsight. In the middle of it, everything had its own logic. I was careful. I was watching a watcher. I was close to danger without being in it. That last part was the lie I loved best.
On a Thursday evening, after a day that dragged on forever, I saw him leave Central through the side exit instead of the main one. He never used the side exit. My whole body straightened. I followed him into rain.
The city after work had that exhausted feel it gets when everyone wants to be home and nobody is. Traffic crawled. Umbrellas bumped. A delivery rider clipped the curb and shouted some creative insults at a taxi. He walked through it all with his hands in his pockets, unhurried, heading away from the bright streets and into the older blocks near the river.
The further we went, the less familiar everything became. Glass towers surrendered to brick warehouses, loading bays and alleyways squeezed between aging buildings. The crowd thinned until there were only a few people ahead of us, then none.
My common sense, which had apparently been on annual leave for weeks, finally came back sunburnt and furious. Go home. I slowed until I was almost standing still.
He turned into a lane between two buildings. I paused at the corner, staring after him.
Rain tapped on the awning above me. My breath somehow sounded too loud suddenly. Somewhere inside the building to my left, music thudded faintly, bass through brick, someone else’s normal night carrying on without me.
I could still leave. I should have. Instead, after counting to thirty, I stepped into the lane.
Empty.
For a second I thought I’d lost him, and the disappointment was so sharp it embarrassed me. Then the fear arrived behind it, late but enthusiastic.
The lane smelled of wet cardboard and old oil. A gutter overflowed steadily onto the pavement. There was a delivery door halfway down, a dead security camera above it, a stack of crates near the far end. No man. I walked farther in. My shoes made soft, stupid wet sounds against the concrete.
At the end of the lane, another alley cut left. Narrower. Darker. The sort of place every woman has been warned about since childhood, though the warnings are always dressed up as concern and never as blame until something happens. I stood there with rain sliding down my neck and thought, very clearly, I am being an idiot.
Then I went in.
A few metres later, I stopped.
The alley opened into a small service courtyard hemmed in by brick walls. A rusted fire escape zigzagged up one side. One security light flickered above a roller door, buzzing like an insect trapped in a jar. He was gone. An uncomfortable emptiness unfurled in my stomach. I had lost him.
“You took longer today.”
The voice came from behind me.
I turned so fast my shoulder hit the wall, pain shooting down my arm. A subtle move, if ever there was one.
He stood at the mouth of the alley, exactly where I had entered, rain shining on his coat. He looked calm. Mildly curious, even. Like a man inspecting fruit at the markets. My tongue stuck uselessly to the roof of my mouth.
He tilted his head. “I wondered when you’d follow me somewhere quiet.”
A strange thing happened then. Fear moved through me, real fear, cold and primal and ancient. The sort that tells prey to run. Beneath it, something else stirred.
Recognition, maybe.
No. Worse.
Relief.
He had noticed.
All those mornings, all those careful distances, all those ridiculous little disguises and altered routes and breathless corners. He had seen me. Of course he had seen me. A man like that would notice a loose thread on a stranger’s cuff from across a street.
“I wasn’t following you,” I said. Brilliant. Inspired. Give the woman a literary prize.
His mouth twitched, nearly a smile. “Twenty-three days.”
The number lodged itself between us. Rain ticked off the fire escape. A car passed somewhere beyond the lane, tyres hissing over water.
Twenty-three.
The precision was obscene. I’d have preferred a wild guess. A lucky shot. Anything, really. He hadn’t guessed. He had counted me.
My hands had started shaking, so I shoved them into my coat pockets and tried to look offended rather than terrified. I suspect the performance was poor.
“You were following that girl,” I said. There. A decent sentence at last.
He studied me for a moment. His eyes were pale, though I couldn’t tell the colour in the flickering light. Grey, maybe. Green. Something washed-out and unpleasantly clear.
“Was I?”
The question should have made me angry. It did, a little. But it also did something worse. It invited me closer to the edge of the thing. It made me want to prove him wrong, prove myself right, dig both hands into the dark and fit the pieces together.
“You know you were,” I said.
He took one step forward. I stayed where I was. That, more than anything, frightened me.
“You should be more careful,” he said.
“I was careful.”
This time he smiled properly. Which, unfortunately, turned out to be worse. He’d looked dangerous before, in this light. Now he looked dangerous and handsome, which felt deeply unfair. Fear is much easier to manage when it’s not attractive.
“No,” he said. “You were interested.”
The courtyard seemed to shrink around us. The wet brick, the buzzing light, the smell of rain and rubbish and old oil. My heart beat so hard I could feel it in my gums. I wanted to run. I wanted him to move closer.
Both truths existed in me at once, ugly little twins, and I hated them for holding hands.
He looked at me as though he could see that too. As though whatever had brought me there was written plainly across my face in cheap marker.
“You followed me because you thought I was dangerous,” he said.
I swallowed.
He came another step nearer.
“And then you kept following because you hoped you were right.”
I had no answer for that.
The awful thing was, he didn’t sound amused or cruel. He sounded almost gentle, which made it worse. Cruelty would have given me something to push against. Gentleness made a room inside the fear.
I thought of the girl in the yellow coat, her silver earrings, her careless smile at the café. I thought of how certain I had been that I was different from him because my watching had a reason. Maybe all monsters begin with a reason. Maybe that’s the trick of it.
He stopped close enough that I could smell rain on wool and coffee on his breath.
“What do you want from me?” I asked, though I wasn’t sure which of us I meant.
His eyes moved over my face, slow as a thumb over a blade.
For one suspended second, the whole city seemed to hold its breath with me.
Then he said, “I think you already know.”
I wish I could tell you he was wrong. That I’d been confused, manipulated, caught off guard. The truth is less flattering. Some buried, famished part of me had known for weeks. Long before he said it. Long before I followed him into that alley. Maybe from the very first morning.