…”drive to the address I’m about to send you. Alone. If you go back inside that store, I’ll know.”
I didn’t walk to my car.
I’d taken a self-defense class at my community center the year before. The instructor said one thing over and over: never let someone move you to a second location. Whatever they’re telling you to do, the place you’re standing is safer than the place they want you to go.
So I did the opposite of what the note said. I turned around and walked straight back into the gas station, holding his phone, and I went right up to the cashier. “I need you to call 911,” I said. “Someone is watching me. Please don’t look out the window.”
She was maybe nineteen. She didn’t ask a single question. She picked up the phone behind the counter and dialed.
On the screen in my hand, the note kept typing. “You’re making a mistake.” Then, “Come outside.” Then nothing.
Police arrived in seven minutes. By then, a gray sedan that had been parked at the air pump the whole time had pulled out and driven away. The cashier had watched it go in the security monitor and read the plate out loud to the dispatcher while I stood there shaking.
They stopped the car four miles down the highway. The driver was a man I’d worked with two years ago, at a job I’d left partly because of him. He’d asked me out three times. I’d said no three times. I hadn’t thought about him since.
The phone was a second phone he’d bought just to keep track of me. He’d dropped it on purpose, right where I’d find it, because he wanted me to see it. The detective said that’s common. The point was for me to know.
He’s been charged with stalking, and the photos on that phone were all the evidence the prosecutor needed. I have a protective order. I have a new job, a new car and a doorbell camera.
I went back to that gas station a month later with a thank-you card and a box of donuts for the cashier. Her name is Brianna. She told me she still thinks about it. “You walked in like you knew exactly what to do,” she said. I didn’t. I just knew I wasn’t going anywhere he wanted me to go.
