“Emily, what happened?”
She grabbed my wrist.
Her fingers were freezing.
“He’s not…” she whispered again, struggling to get the words out. “He’s not the person you think he is.”
I looked at Jason.
My brother had gone completely silent.
“Jason,” I said slowly, “why are you here?”
He didn’t answer.
Emily’s grip tightened around my wrist.
“He came because I called him.”
The words hit me harder than anything else could have.
“You called him?”
She nodded, tears mixing with the water running down her face.
“I didn’t know who else to call.”
I stared at her.
“But why didn’t you call me?”
“I tried.”
She pointed weakly toward the bathroom counter.
My eyes followed her finger.
My phone was sitting there.
Beside it was Emily’s phone, its screen black.
Then I noticed something I hadn’t seen before.
A small plastic medicine bottle was lying on its side next to the sink.
The label had been torn almost completely off.
“What is that?”
Emily looked at Jason.
Jason finally spoke.
“She took something.”
My stomach dropped.
“What do you mean, she took something?”
Jason stepped forward, but I immediately put my hand up.
“Stay where you are.”
He stopped.
Emily began crying.
“I didn’t mean to.”
“Didn’t mean to what?”
She shook her head.
“I thought they were my normal pills. I was half asleep. I took two, then realized they weren’t mine.”
Jason swallowed.
“She called me because she couldn’t stand up.”
I looked at him in disbelief.
“You were helping her?”
“Yes.”
“Then why were you both fully dressed under the shower?”
Jason looked toward the tub.
“Because she was burning up.”
Emily nodded weakly.
“I had a fever. Jason came in because I couldn’t unlock the door properly. I was dizzy. I kept falling.”
I felt something inside me collapse.
All the terrible assumptions I’d made on that walk down the hallway suddenly seemed cruel.
But there was still something that didn’t make sense.
“Why were you holding her like that?”
Jason looked at me.
“She passed out.”
Silence.
“She stopped responding for almost thirty seconds,” he continued. “I put her in the tub because I needed to cool her down while I tried to wake her.”
My eyes went back to Emily.
Her lips were pale.
Her body was still shaking.
I knelt beside the bathtub.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
She looked at me with tears in her eyes.
“I was scared you’d panic.”
I almost laughed, but there was nothing funny about any of it.
“You were right.”
Jason reached for a towel.
I let him.
For the first time since I had opened that bathroom door, I stopped seeing him as the man standing beside my wife.
I saw my little brother again.
The kid who used to sleep on the floor beside my bed whenever thunderstorms scared him.
The kid who once called me at three in the morning because his car wouldn’t start.
The kid I had trusted.
“Call an ambulance,” I said.
Jason was already reaching for his phone.
While we waited, I helped Emily out of the tub and wrapped her in two towels.
She leaned against me, barely able to stand.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“You don’t have anything to apologize for.”
“Yes, I do.”
She looked up at me.
“I lied this morning.”
My heart tightened.
“About what?”
She hesitated.
“I didn’t just wake up with a fever.”
Jason looked at her.
I could tell he already knew.
Emily took a shaky breath.
“Yesterday, I started feeling strange. Dizzy. Confused. My vision kept going blurry. I thought it was stress.”
She pointed toward the medicine bottle.
“But those pills weren’t mine.”
I stared at the bottle again.
“Whose were they?”
Jason answered.
“Mine.”
I looked at him.
“Why were your pills here?”
He hesitated.
Then Emily spoke.
“Because Jason came over last night.”
I frowned.
“For what?”
She looked down.
“To tell me something about you.”
My chest tightened.
“About me?”
Jason closed his eyes.
“Mike, I was trying to protect you.”
“From what?”
He didn’t answer immediately.
Then he reached into his soaked hoodie pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper.
He handed it to me.
I opened it.
It was a printed photograph.
My wife and I stood outside our apartment building.
The picture had been taken from across the parking lot.
On the back was a handwritten sentence.
He knows where you live.
I looked at Jason.
“What is this?”
His face had lost all its color.
“I found it under my windshield wiper this morning.”
My blood ran cold.
Emily started crying again.
“I didn’t want you to know because I was afraid you’d confront him.”
“Who?”
Jason looked directly at me.
“The man who’s been following Emily for the past two weeks.”
The bathroom suddenly felt smaller.
The ambulance siren could be heard approaching in the distance.
I looked at my wife.
“Emily, who is following you?”
She squeezed my hand.
“I don’t know his name.”
“Then how do you know he’s following you?”
Her eyes filled with tears.
“Because yesterday, he was standing outside the apartment.”
I felt every muscle in my body tense.
“Did you see his face?”
Emily nodded.
Then she whispered something that made my stomach drop.
“He looks exactly like you.”
I stared at her.
Jason stared at her too.
For several seconds, nobody spoke.
Then someone knocked on our apartment door.
Three slow knocks.
Jason froze.
Emily grabbed my arm.
And from the hallway came a man’s voice.
“Emily?”
My wife stopped breathing.
Because it wasn’t a stranger’s voice.
It was mine.
