I turned it over and felt the blood drain from my face when I saw the red letters scrawled across the front of it. “Whore.”
A chill ran through me from where I was holding the envelope, a sense of foreboding growing in my gut. Tiana finally found her key and was in the process of making another joke when she saw the expression on my face. “What’s wrong? What is that?”
I held the envelope up to her so she could read the word printed on the front, working on opening the flap as I watched her eyes go wide. “What the fuck?”
“I don’t know.” Jannie’s name started rolling like ticker tape through my head. I pulled the mouth of the envelope open and turned it over to catch a series of photographs that came tumbling out.
My stomach turned when I set the envelope on top of the row of mailboxes and started going through the photos. “Oh my god. They’re all of me and Jeremiah in the last couple of weeks.”
“Weeks?” Tiana echoed, her voice as hushed and trembling as mine. She came to stand next to me and looked over my shoulder as I examined the photos one by one.
“This was taken the night of our first dinner out.” I narrated for Tiana’s sake and because saying it out loud made me shake out of the haze of fear settling like a scratchy old scarf around my neck and shoulders. “And this one is of us talking in the car one night when he dropped me off.”
I kept going, staring incredulously as at least a half a dozen more images of Jeremiah and I and of me alone made my knees weak and my legs numb. “The gala. Going into his apartment building on Friday night. Leaving Saturday morning.”
“Holy creepy crackers on toast,” Tiana whispered, taking the pictures from me one after the other to study them herself. “I know I said it before, but what the fuck?”
“It’s Jannie,” I said quietly, swallowing bile creeping up at the back of my throat. “It has to be her.”
“The crazy ex-secretary?” Tiana asked. She reached for the envelope and stuffed the pictures back inside. “We should call the cops. She practically assaulted you at the office, and now she’s delivering pictures of intimate moments between you too. How does she even know where you live?”
My skin felt like it had bugs crawling all over it. Nausea threatened to overwhelm me. “I don’t know. She must’ve gotten our address from someone she still knows in HR at Williams Inc. Or maybe she just followed me from there. She for sure has been following us, though I don’t know how she knew which mailbox was mine.”
We rented our mailboxes separately, and each one only had a tiny plaque with its number on it. Not our names or even our apartment numbers. Tiana shuddered, putting her arms around my shoulders. “Let’s go upstairs and call the cops. They’ll know what to do.”
Numb as I was, I shook my head. “I’ll bring all these to work in the morning and show Jeremiah. He’s already got building security on her. It’s not against the law to send someone mail. I think going to the cops right now will just waste our time.”
Doubt colored Tiana’s eyes, but she nodded. “Okay. It’s your call. Are you sure you want to wait until the morning? I could go over there with you now.”
“No, it’s a Sunday night. Nothing’s going to happen until tomorrow morning anyway. He has a big meeting with his father first thing, but he needs to know. I’ll talk to him about it before.”
“Okay, as long as you’re sure.” She squeezed my shoulders before she let them go. “Let’s go dance out some of the adrenaline from the shock.”
“You go ahead, I’m not up to it right now.” If I had to jump around and dance, no one in my immediate vicinity would be safe from the sick feeling rolling around my belly. “I’ll throw up on people if I try.”
“I understand,” she said, linking our elbows together as she started heading back upstairs. “How about a hot bath with all your salts and potions in it?”
That sounded much better, though I knew nothing was going to be enough to take this feeling away completely until I spoke to Jeremiah about it. “Sure. You better shower first though, I don’t plan on getting out until the water’s gone cold and there’s no more hot water to add.”
“We never went to dance class, so I’m good on the shower. Stay in the bath as long as you like. I’ll find a movie for us to watch for when you get out.”
“Thank you,” I said sincerely as we walked back into our apartment. After making sure our door was locked, bolted and the chain was on, I went to run my bath. While I waited for the water level to be high enough to get in, I added all my magic relaxation ingredients and tried to focus on the heavenly scent instead of the envelope now lying on our kitchen counter.
I couldn’t help thinking back to all those nights in the photos no matter how hard I tried not to. Then I remembered the creepy feeling I got the other night when I was standing outside waving as he drove away.
What if that was because Jannie had been there? Watching. Waiting… But waiting for what, exactly?