Damon started moving different.
No announcements.
No visible changes from the outside.
He still left the porch light on.
Still let the TV glow through the front window at night. Still pulled his truck into the driveway at the same angle every evening.
He gave her nothing to feed on.
But inside, he had shifted completely.
The documentation binder was now twenty-four pages.
Timestamps, locations, vehicle descriptions, photographs, the shadow projection incident, the hotel.
All of it organized by date, cross-referenced, color-tabbed.
His cousin Terrell, who did private security work out of Atlanta, had looked it over on a video call and said, “Damon, this is stalking at a clinical level.
Whoever she is, she’s not improvising. She’s planned this.”
Damon already knew that. What he needed now was a name.
So he changed his mornings routine.
He started setting his alarm forty minutes earlier.
Would dress in the dark, skip the porch, exit through the side door into the backyard, cut between his house and the neighbors house and come around the long way to his truck.
He pull out slow, no headlights until he reached the end of the block, and then circle around to park on Whitmore — a side street with a clean sight straight down to his house.
Then he sat and waited.
Thermos of coffee. Phone face-down. Eyes on the block.
Three mornings, nothing.
Fourth morning, 6:47 a.m. — a burgundy Honda Accord rolled past his house at the speed of someone trying not to look like they were looking.
He let her get a full block ahead before he pulled out.
He followed her for eleven minutes.
She drove careful, unhurried, which told him she didn’t notice she was being followed.
She didn’t check her mirrors the way a person checks them when they know they’re being watched.
She made three turns, merged onto a residential street on the southeast side of the city, and pulled into the driveway of a tan brick house on Calhoun Street.
Damon drove past without slowing.
Parked two blocks down.
Sat with the engine off.
He knew this street.
He knew it because he had driven it a hundred times over nine years.
Knew it because he had picked up and dropped off on this exact block more times than he could count.
Knew the cracked sidewalk in front of the corner house, knew the chain-link fence with the missing post, knew the big oak on the left side that dropped branches every storm.
He knew it because his children lived on this street.
His kids’ mother, Kezia, lived four houses from the corner.
The young woman had pulled into the house directly next door.
Damon sat very still for a long time.
His first instinct was to call Kezia right then.
His second instinct the more disciplined one told him to wait.
To think.
To be precise before jumping to conclusions, because a wrong accusation aimed at the mother of his children could detonate things that had taken years to stabilize.
But his mind was already laying it out whether he wanted it to or not.
Kezia knew his schedule.
Knew when he left for work, what truck he drove, which hardware store he used, what nursery supplied his business.
Knew the hotel on Piedmont because they stayed there before, back when they were still trying to figure out what they were to each other.
Kezia had access to details no stranger should have.
And right next door was a young woman in her early twenties who had apparently built her entire life around monitoring a man she had never once spoken to.
Did she put her up to this?