“I … don’t have it on me,” Bette said, staring at her wife, and then realizing: “Oh, wait. I think … I think I have a picture of it on my phone. Jesus … Pat, you’d better not be right.” She took off down the hall to get her purse, rushing back in even faster. She held onto her phone and swallowed hard, terrified for her wife’s possible reactions. She didn’t want it to be true – Bette wouldn’t know how to forgive herself for putting Tina in danger, too.

Tina didn’t ask to see it, because it was implied that she would. And a part of her was just as terrified to look at it. What if it was the stalker? What if that woman had been in her house?

As the phone was finally passed over to her, Tina took one look, and dropped it on the couch, scrambling away from it, and practically crawling into Patricia’s lap to distance herself. Bette rushed over to her, and pulled her in close for a supportive hug – looking over Tina’s shoulder at her colleague and friend.

This is bad. Real bad.

Patricia took the phone, looked again at a picture Bette had shown her before, and turned it off as Tina started to hyperventilate with panic.

Both women settled her down, and sat with her, asking what the stalker had done or said while she was in the house. As unsettling as it was, they had to know.

“I … I don’t know …” Tina trembled, “But she knew what she was doing … I … she wasn’t just some stranger. She really worked for them! … I … I didn’t know. I thought she did …”

“I know,” Bette said, comforting Tina with a hand on her back as she glanced over to her friend who was holding Tina’s hand. “I know, hunny. But what did she say to you?”

“Umm … I don’t know. She seemed really normal. She … asked me if I was having some friends over, and when I said my wife and my wife’s friend … then she stopped asking me questions. Oh, and … I didn’t find this weird at the time, but … I think she was prolonging fixing the TV, because when she heard us talking over the phone about your early visit, she was done almost immediately.”