Renato Theodorou stands in the doorway of her office holding a manila envelope, and the first thing she notices, absurdly, is that he is not wearing the corduroy jacket. He is wearing a dark button-down, and he looks smaller without it, diminished, like a word missing its context.
“Dr. Xu,” he says. “I need you to hear me out.”
“Get out of my office.”
“Please.” He doesn’t move forward. He stays in the doorway, which she will think about later — he stays in the doorway. “Five minutes. I know how this looks. I know everything I’ve done has looked wrong. But you are in danger from someone else, and I have been trying to tell you without—”
“I’m calling security.”
“The note about your mother was information I received. I didn’t surveil your family. I was surveilling the man who has been surveilling you.”
The fluorescent light in the hallway flickers once behind him.
“His name is Callum Ferris,” Theodorou says. “He was a student in your Cultural Anthropology section four years ago. He failed. He blamed you. He has been documenting your movements for fourteen months. The note — I took it from him before he could deliver it himself. I was trying to warn you without terrifying you. I did it wrong. I know I did it wrong.”
He holds out the manila envelope. She does not take it.
But she does not call security either.
Not yet.
—
The detective across the table from her now writes something else down. He underlines it.
“And the envelope,” he says. “What was inside?”
“Photographs,” Nana says. “Of me. Taken over a long period. Different locations. He had annotated some of them. Dates, times. Notes about my patterns.” She pauses. “They weren’t taken by Theodorou. The angles were all wrong for that. And some of them were from before Theodorou ever appeared at Meridian.”
The detective nods slowly.
“We found Ferris,” he says. “He’s in custody. We also confirmed that Theodorou is a licensed private investigator. He was hired six weeks ago to look into Ferris.”
“Hired by whom?” Nana asks.
The detective sets down his pen. He looks at her the way people look at someone when they are rearranging what they understand about that person in real time.
“Your sister,” he says. “Wenling Xu. She noticed someone following you at your mother’s birthday dinner in March. She didn’t tell you because she didn’t want to frighten you before she was certain. She hired Theodorou to confirm her suspicion and gather evidence for a restraining order.”
Nana is quiet for a long time.
The detective waits.
Outside, Pittsburgh carries on — the river traffic on the Allegheny, the low percussion of the city going about its indifferent business. Inside this room, Nana Xu sits with the strange, tilting feeling of a story she thought she understood becoming an entirely different story.
Her sister called the landline at her mother’s house that night not just to report a fall.
She called to say: *I’m handling it. I’m trying to keep you safe.*
She left a message no one answered.
Nana thinks about the note, the corduroy jacket, the footsteps in the hallway. She thinks about how fear had arranged all of it into one shape — the shape of a threat — when the actual shape was something far older and quieter.
She had been surrounded, the whole time, by someone watching over her.
She just hadn’t known which direction to look.
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