I Asked a Stranger If I Could Sit With Him — He Was Sent to Spy on Me Because My Real Father Runs Half of Chicago

Part 1

I asked a stranger if I could sit with him.

That’s the whole reason any of this happened.

Eight months ago I buried my mother, and since then the Cudahy Library has been the only place in Chicago that doesn’t feel like a waiting room for grief.

Every table was full that afternoon.

Rain hammered the windows so hard the whole room smelled like wet wool and burnt coffee.

I had a nursing exam in two days and exactly one good chair left to find.

It belonged to a guy tucked behind the oak shelves, alone, a laptop open in front of him that he wasn’t actually looking at.

“Can I sit with you?” I asked.

He looked up like the question cost him something.

Then he nodded once and slid the chair out with his foot.

“Thanks,” I said, dropping into it like my legs had been waiting all day for permission to quit.

“Midterms?” he said.

“Cardiovascular system or me.”

“One of us isn’t surviving the week.”

His name was Tyler.

He didn’t laugh, but something at the corner of his mouth moved like it wanted to.

I noticed two older men by the reference section, the kind of men who fill out a coat instead of wearing it.

I didn’t think anything of it.

I never thought anything of men like that, because nothing in my life had ever taught me to.

My mother raised me alone.

She was a nurse, she worked nights, and she told me my father was a traveling salesman who died before I was born.

I believed her completely, the way you believe the only person who’s ever stayed.

Three weeks went by like that.

Coffee before class.

Walks along the lake when neither of us wanted to say goodnight yet.

Tyler never talked about his family, and I never pushed, because I’d learned the hard way that some silences are just grief wearing a different coat.

I started to feel something I hadn’t let myself feel since the funeral.

Something that looked like a future.

He started showing up to the library before I did, like he wanted the same seat.

I thought that meant he liked me.

I didn’t know yet that he was watching the door.

Thursday night he didn’t answer my texts for six hours, and when he finally did, his voice on the phone sounded like a man reading off a script he hated.

I told myself it was midterms.

I told myself a lot of things that week.

Friday evening I was walking back from Navy Pier with a hot cider going cold in my hand when he found me.

He didn’t say hello.

He grabbed my shoulders and his eyes were doing something I’d never seen them do.

“We need to leave.”

“Right now.”

“Tyler, you’re hurting me.”

He loosened his grip but not his stare, scanning the pier behind me like he was counting exits.

“There’s a lot about your life you don’t know,” he said.

“About your family.”

I laughed, because it was such a strange thing to say to a girl whose family was a dead mother and a folder of unpaid student loan statements.

“Tyler, I don’t have a family.”

“I have a balance due.”

He didn’t laugh back.

That was the part that scared me, more than his hands, more than his face.

“I keep seeing the same men everywhere,” I said, my voice smaller than I wanted it to be.

“Those guys from the library.”

“I thought I was losing it.”

“You’re not losing it,” he said.

Behind him, fifty yards down the pier, a man I’d seen twice before lit a cigarette under a lamppost and didn’t take his eyes off us.

“Megan—” Tyler stopped himself, like the next sentence was a door he wasn’t ready to open.

Headlights swung around the end of the pier, no siren, no warning, moving too fast for a parking lot at this hour.

A black SUV accelerated straight toward us, tires screaming against the wet concrete, and Tyler’s hand closed around my arm hard enough to bruise as he turned and saw it too.

“Get down,” he said, and for the first time since the day I met him, there was nothing soft left in his voice at all.