Someone Is Watching Read Online Free PDF

isn’t around to see me now. Not even her kiss could fix this.
    I’m friendly with Alissa Dunphy, the third-year associate I was working for the night I was attacked, and Sally Ogilby, assistant to Phil Cunningham, the firm’s top family lawyer, but I rarely see them outside of work. Alissa is chained to her desk, determined to make partner before she turns thirty-five, and Sally is married, the mother of a three-year-old boy and expecting her second child, this one a girl, in a couple of months. This doesn’t leave her a lot of time for other interests. Her life is very busy. Our lives are all very busy.
    Correction:
Were.
    My life used to be busy. My life used to be a lot of things.
    Alissa has called every day since the attack, repeatedly telling me how sorry she is, how responsible she feels, asking if there’s anything she can do to help me through this difficult time. I tell her no, there’s nothing, and I can almost hear her sigh with relief. “You’ll tell me,” she says before hanging up the phone, “if there’s anything you need …”
    I need my life back. I need things to go back to the way they were before. I need to find out who did this to me.
    The police think it was a random act, a crime of opportunity, a case of wrong time, wrong place. Still, they ask: Can there be anyone I have investigated, anyone whose marriage my photographs helped scuttle, anyone whose business failed because of information I uncovered, anyone at all who hates me that much to do what he did?
    I think of the testimony I gave in court the morning of my attack, the venom that shot from Todd Elder’s eyes as he leaned against the wall outside the courtroom, the word
bitch
spewing silently from his lips. He fits the rapist’s general description. As does Owen Weaver, I realize, recalling our short-lived flirtation and his mouthful of straight white teeth. I shudder, feeling those teeth rip into my breast. Is it possible?
    “Can you remember anything about the man at all?” I ask myself daily, repeating the police officer’s question.
    I search my mind, scrape it clean for the tiniest of fragments, trying to be as persistent, as methodical, as resourceful in my private life as I used to be professionally. But I find nothing. I see nothing.
    “It could have been worse,” I recall one of the nurses saying. “He could have sodomized you. He could have forced you to use your mouth.”
    “I wish he had,” I hear myself tell her. “I would have bitten his dick right off.”
    “He’d have killed you.”
    “It would have been worth it.”
    Is it possible this exchange actually took place? Or am I only imagining it? And if this conversation really occurred, what else have I suppressed? What else is out there, too terrible to see, too awful to remember?
    —
    A typical day, post-rape: Wake up at five in the morning after maybe an hour or two of sleep. Shake off one of several recurring nightmares—a masked man chasing me through the street, awoman watching from her balcony, doing nothing; sharks circling my feet in placid waters—climb out of bed and search through the top drawer of my nightstand, locate the large pair of scissors I have kept there ever since my attack, and begin my morning search of my apartment.
    Whoever raped me stole my gun, and I have yet to replace it. But that’s all right. I’ve decided there’s something more visceral, more personal, more satisfying, about scissors. Whenever I think about striking back at the man who assaulted me—and I think about this as often as I take a breath—I never think of shooting him. I think of stabbing him, as he stabbed me. And even if I can’t use my body as a weapon the same way he could, I can still tear at his flesh as he tore at mine, the scissors an extension of my arm, my fury.
    Such is the person I’ve become. Such is the woman he made me.
    Holding the scissors in front of me, I check under my bed, even though it sits too low to the ground to allow