“Why should I go into the bedroom?” she asks.

“Because it’s the room farthest from the front door. Once you’re in your bedroom, I’ll come in and take a look around.” The phone line doesn’t reduce the effect of her voice. I try to shut it out and concentrate on the task at hand. Her lock is a standard pin tumbler. It will take me all of a minute to pick.

“How do you know where my bedroom is?”

“The floor plans are on the Internet from when this building was being leased.” Sticking the tension wrench into the keyhole, I press until the plug begins to rotate. Time for the rake. Three passes of the rake later, the pins bounce into place and the lock disengages.

“Ugh,” she replies, but she doesn’t hang up.

She’d probably never leave her bedroom if she knew how easy it was to gain entry into her home.

Natalie’s apartment is good-sized by Manhattan standards. She has a fairly large living room with floor-to-ceiling windows that run along the far wall. Two of the windows are actually doors that open onto a small balcony overlooking Howard Street. To the immediate left is the kitchen. My card lies on the granite island counter. To the right a door rests slightly ajar.

“You and Graham could live in a place with more security.” I poke the door and it falls open. Inside is an office. There’s a treadmill with a platform attached to it at elbow height. A laptop sits on top of the platform. She must . . . type while she walks? I hadn’t seen one of those before. There’s a whiteboard filled with text, arrows, Post-it Notes. The room is ringed with bookshelves. I venture further in.

The shelves are filled with nonfiction and fiction alike. Romances, science fiction, mystery. She has eclectic taste.

“This is a small condo and we don’t get a lot of attention here, which Oliver really likes. Plus, we have a doorman.”

“He’s pretty useless.”

“You are the bearer of not very good news. Are you like that with everyone or am I getting special treatment?”

If she’d texted that, I might have thought it was a come-on, but she sounded weary rather than flirtatious.

“I give out facts. How my clients choose to interpret those is up to them.” At the very top row of the bookshelves are multiple copies of the same book by the same author—a very famous author. “M. Kannan?” I murmur.

“Are you inside my apartment?” she shouts.

I pull the phone away from my ear.

“Yup.”

“Oh my God, you picked my lock. You’re in my apartment!” Her too-quick breaths fill my ear.

“Natalie, go sit on the bed. Imagine a square. Breathe in for four seconds and then walk to the other side of the square and exhale. Breathe in for four seconds and then out for four seconds,” I command in my best drill sergeant voice. I wasn’t a DS in the army, but I got yelled at by one enough that I can replicate his commanding voice with ease. I can almost taste her panic over the phone. “Start counting. One, two, three, four.” She doesn’t obey, and I hear her breathing coming in short pants. “Now,” I bark.

There’s a shuffling and then I hear the numbers. The first one is quavery and it takes her about five seconds to get the second one out. “Louder. I want them loud and crisp.”

She starts over at one. By the fourth set she’s breathing more easily. Yeah, the guy who did this is going to have a real pleasant visit from both Graham and me. “Good girl, Natalie. You’re doing fine. I’m almost done here. Keep counting.”

“Fuck you,” she gurgles out between numbers three and four.

The insult makes me grin, but my smile fades as I spin around. This place isn’t that big. And if it’s the only place she feels safe, then her life is pretty miserable.

In the soft blue living room are three large framed posters of the covers of a bestselling science fiction series—a series that is being made into a movie. The light bulb turns on over my head. Natalie Beck is M. Kannan. That must be how she affords this Tribeca condo. And it makes sense. She wrote the storyline for one of the most famous games of recent memory, and now she’s writing bestselling science fiction. And it’s a series I fucking love.

“I’ve read you.” I don’t get starstruck. I’ve worked with too many celebrities to be awed by them, but I am standing about twenty feet away from the person the New York Times has called “a revolutionary new eye into the future.” “I thought M. Kannan was a man” is my first thought.

I know who you are.

The threat takes on a different dimension.

She snorts, interrupting her counting. “Male readers don’t read female authors. It’s more lucrative to be gender neutral, especially when you’re writing science fiction.”

The words rush out, as if she’s saying them all in one breath, but at least she’s talking and thinking and not passing out. The panic attack is tapering off.

Mentally I run through my bookcases and realize I have embarrassingly few female authors on my shelf. “Like I said before, men are dumb.”

“Yes, yes they are.” When she half laughs, I exhale and realize I’d been holding my breath, waiting to run into the bedroom. Phobias are a bitch to fight off. Too many of my brothers-in-arms suffer from them and mental illnesses are viewed differently than physical illnesses. If a friend is sick with the flu, or God forbid, something worse like cancer, everyone is sympathetic. But depression? Fear of being in your own head? Folks just want you to get over it and if you can’t, you’re a weak-ass sadsack.

I don’t know why I don’t have PTSD. It’s not because I’m better or stronger than my squad mates—more likely that I’m just a cold bastard. That’s what my youngest sister claims.

“I’m going to need you to sign my books.” She has a big-screen television, one of those curved ones, and three different game consoles underneath. Whatever happened in her past, it hadn’t killed her love for the medium. I finish my inspection of the interior and walk to the kitchen.

“Just bring them over. You know how to get in.” Her sultry voice is about an octave lower than earlier, and scratchy, as if she’s spent a long time screaming. A quick vision of sheets, bedposts, and an arched back flash through my mind.

All right, Jake. Get a hold of yourself. It’s only been a few weeks since I last got laid so I’m not sure why I’m having such a visceral reaction to this woman whose face I haven’t seen.

“I’m almost done here.”

The last room is her bedroom and while I need to see inside of it, I know she’s not ready. Not today. Resolutely I turn away. “I’m leaving now.”

At the kitchen counter, I pull out a small jar of powder and a brush. “A pre-Hollywood invention. Fingerprint dusting powder so you know where I was in your apartment,” I write on a notepad I find on the counter.

I hope my token apology for interfering with her life, causing a slight panic attack, is offset by this. As I climb the stairs to the top floor, so it looks like I was with Graham the whole time, and then travel down the elevator to the lobby, something about the whole sweep of the apartment nags at me. Was it that I didn’t get to see her bedroom and complete my assessment of her security needs? Was it that I didn’t get to take Natalie’s measure by looking her in the eye?

It isn’t until my feet hit the sidewalk that I realize that I want Natalie to like me, not to be afraid of me. I look down at my arm, the one that is missing a hand, and then the leg, the one that is missing the calf and foot. Turning around, I stare up at the window in the far right corner. There’s a movement there, a twitch of the curtain. I hold up my good hand and shove the bad one in my pocket.

No, let’s be honest. I want Natalie to be attracted to me.