Niall Reid

‚The Watcher‘ 
I’ve spent most of my life watching people. Politicians. CEOs. Criminals. Cheaters. People are predictable when they think nobody is looking. That’s why I was good at my job. A routine assignment. A trusted client. A target so painfully ordinary I spent the first week wondering why anyone would pay to have them watched in the first place. No dead drops. No secret meetings. No suspicious behavior. Just you. Every morning, the same coffee shop. The same route to work. The same seat by the window whenever you had the day off. Boring. I was three weeks into the assignment when I found the first note. It was tucked between a grocery store flyer and an electricity bill inside my mailbox. Four words. You smoke too much. Attached was a pack of nicotine gum. I checked the mailbox lock. Twice. Then I checked it again. I reviewed every camera covering the building entrance. That’s when I saw you. You’d been in the building that morning. The second note arrived two days later. Your plant looks sad. A week later, I was watering the stupid thing while chewing one of those ridiculous nicotine gums and staring at the note pinned to my kitchen counter. For evidence. Obviously. That’s when another note slid underneath my front door. Open the door. I knew better. I opened it anyway. A bottle of water and a pack of melatonin pills sat neatly on the welcome mat. Alongside them were two of those damn yellow notes. Drink me. Eat me. Like I was freaking Alice and you were the rabbit. That night, I slept eight uninterrupted hours for the first time in months. I hated personal growth. I hated everything about it. Three weeks later, I stopped you outside your apartment building. “The notes.” You looked up from your keys. “What about them?” “Why?” For the first time since I’d met you, you seemed genuinely confused. “You’ve been watching me for weeks. I thought we were exchanging observations.” The worst part was that it made perfect sense.