Chapter 236
Chapter 233. Carstalked
DANTE
I had run this route, or a version of it, before every competition for fifteen years.
Not the same streets, never the same city twice in a row, but the same architecture underneath it. Forty minutes. Light cardio, nothing that taxed the legs the day before a match mattered.
There was no music in unfamiliar cities and no headphones. A coach had told me once, early on, that a player who didn’t notice the room he was standing in wouldn’t last in this sport. The habit had outlived the coach. Outlived three more after him. Outlived the version of me who’d needed telling.
Chicago in December was cold enough to empty the sidewalks by six-forty in the morning. The light was good, low, flat across the buildings, and the air had that sharp winter edge that woke the lungs up faster than coffee.
I liked this part of the ritual. The quiet streets. The body moving through its own checklist, hips, calves, the shoulder that still complained in cold weather from an old injury, while the mind ran its own separate checklist underneath.
I came around the corner three blocks from the venue.
A car accelerated from a parked position into the street.
My body moved before my mind finished registering what it was moving from.
This was the thing about fifteen years of competitive reflex: it didn’t ask permission. It didn’t wait for the conscious assessment to complete before committing to the action. The same trained response that let me read a serve before the ball fully left the racket took over completely, and I was already off the direct line of the car’s path by the time any part of me had formed the actual thought: that’s too close.
The car passed near enough that I felt the air displace against my arm. Not contact. Close enough that contact had been the alternative outcome, the one my body had calculated and avoided in roughly half a second.
It didn’t slow down.
It rounded the next corner at speed, tires audible against the cold asphalt, and was gone.
I stood on the sidewalk. My heart was going hard, the simple physical aftermath of adrenaline that had nowhere left to discharge. I looked at the corner where the car had disappeared. Grey sedan, older model, nothing distinctive about it that I could pull into a usable description. There was no plate. I hadn’t been looking for one. I’d just been moving, trying to get out of the way.
I stood there for maybe ten seconds. Breathing harder than the run had even made me breathe.
A woman across the street, walking with her dog, had stopped. She was still watching me, that careful stillness right before someone decides to ask if you’re alright. I lifted my hand. Fine. Thank you. She nodded and kept walking. The street went back to being an ordinary cold morning in Lincoln Park.
13
Car Stalked
Hooked at the corner one more time. Then I finished my run. This was a decision, not an oversight.
Claim
A close call with an inattentive driver, that happens in any city, on any morning, to any pedestrian standing in the wrong six feet of sidewalk at the wrong second. I told myself this the whole way back to the Lincoln Park house. In time with my footsteps. The way you repeat anything, you need to be true.
By the time it had mostly worked, I was at the front steps. My heart rate had come back down.
I went inside. Sedona was in the kitchen. She had her hair pulled back, and she was reading through something Maria had sent, the bracket confirmation, probably, or the venue logistics for tomorrow, with the kind of attention that meant she’d already read it twice and was reading it a third time because the reading itself was steadying.
She looked up when I came in.
“Car came close on my route,” I said. I said with my back half-turned. And said it like it was nothing. The kind of thing you say once and let go. “Wasn’t paying attention, probably. Happens in cities p>
She looked at me for a second longer than the sentence required. Something crossed her face, quick, there and gone, the specific flicker of someone whose instincts had been trained by months of surveillance reports and operatives in gardens and a husband who solved problems by removing the things that were in his way. I watched her decide not to chase it. Not because she hadn’t registered it. Because she had a competition starting tomorrow and a finite quantity of attention to spend, and she was choosing, with the same deliberateness she brought to everything now, exactly where to spend it.
“You’re alright p>
“I’m fine p>
This was not entirely true. I had broken stride. I had broken stride significantly; in the specific direction my body had decided was survival.
“Okay,” she said.
She went back to the bracket. I let her. I didn’t know Cameron was in the next room.
I didn’t see this happen. I was thinking about my serve, and the seeding, and whether Sedona had actually eaten anything yet today or was running on the coffee alone, and the small private relief of having survived something I had mostly succeeded in convincing myself wasn’t significant.
ľ
Cameron didn’t ask me anything. He simply excused himself a few minutes later, quietly, the way he did most things that mattered, no announcement, no visible urgency, and went into the hallway with his phone already in his hand before he’d fully closed the door behind him.
I didn’t think about the car again for the better part of an hour. I was upstairs going through my bag. I checked my racket strings, running the mental list every player runs the night before a tournament. Passport. Accreditation. The small worries that had nothing to do with grey sedans on quiet streets.
The house went quiet around him. The way a room changes when someone walks in carrying something they haven’t worked out how to put down yet.
I came downstairs. Cameron was standing near the counter with his phone still in his hand, and on his face was a stillness I would come to recognize, over the following hour, as the look of a man who had just
23
Car Stalked
confirmed something he had badly, badly hoped would not be confirmed.
He looked at me.
“Dante,” he said. “Tell me about the car again. Slowly p>
Comments
LUCK DRAW >
Vote
545
Florence
A passionate storyteller who brings emotions to life through her words. When she’s not writing, she finds peace nurturing her garden.