Anita took a deep breath, hoping this would go well but afraid that it wouldn’t. “I think we need to stop,” she said.
“Stop? Stop what?”
“This,” she said, indicating the air between them. “Whatever is going on here.”
The frown deepened. “What’s going on here…” He waved his hands in a mockery of her motion. “…is a mutual—”
“Was a mutual—”
He nodded, smiling tightly. “I get it. I know what’s happening. You’ve come by to end it.”
“There’s nothing to end.”
“That’s not what you said at lunch the other day.”
Anita reddened. “Okay. You’re right. But I’m ending it now. It’s gone far enough.”
“Is it the text? I admit, maybe I was a little forward, or a little too enthusiastic, but you’ve got to admit, we’ve had some pretty—”
“It’s not the text. Or not just the text.” Once again, she breathed deeply. “I made a mistake, okay? It’s my fault. But now I’m correcting that mistake.”
“That’s what you think we were? A mistake?”
He walked out from behind the orchid table, and she gasped. He had undone his pants, unbuckling, unzipping and spreading open the front of his jeans, and his penis was sticking out, completely erect. A week ago—two days ago, even—she might have been amused or even aroused by such a gesture, but now there seemed something threatening about it, and she took an involuntary step backward.
“A lot of things grow in here,” he said. There was an insistence in his smile that caused her to gauge how far it was to the exit. “Come on. You know you want it.”
Any thought she had of being strong and standing her ground fled, and without another word, Anita turned tail and ran. She sped out of the greenhouse, past the potting shed and the register counter, into the parking lot, where she scrambled into her car and started the engine. Filled with panic, she dared not even glance toward the nursery, but kept her eyes on the rearview mirror as she swung the car around then determinedly faced forward as she drove out of the parking lot onto the street.
Her heart was pounding so hard she could feel the pulse in her wrists, hear the blood thumping in her head. Farther down the street, she saw Nick’s friend Victor walking his dog. Wasn’t he supposed to be in school? He looked over at her as if he didn’t recognize her, then turned his attention to the sidewalk in front of him.
He knows! was her first thought. It didn’t make any sense, but it was easy for her to imagine that he’d walked his dog over to the nursery and had been about to come in when he saw Steven with his exposed erection.
Oh God, Anita thought. What if he tells Nick? Or Kyle? Or his parents? Or anyone?
But that was the guilt talking. He couldn’t have seen anything. The event had happened in the greenhouse, away from the street. He would have had to come into the building in order to see anything—and he hadn’t.
Still, she remained nervous and jumpy, and she found herself driving up Airport Road and then back to the downtown along Frontier Street, next to the creek, in order to calm herself down. She still had nearly a half hour to spare, and though she’d brought her lunch today, she’d left it back at the office. Not yet ready to face people, she went through the drive-thru at Burger King and ate in the car in the Safeway parking lot before heading back to work.
Her phone rang when she was halfway between her car and the office door. After checking to make sure it wasn’t Steven, she picked up. “Hello?”
A woman’s voice with a Southern accent: “Am I speaking to Anita Decker?”
“Yes,” she said suspiciously.
“This is Marjorie with Citibank. We are detecting attempted activity on your Visa account at—” There was a second’s hesitation. “—the Best Buy at 7400 Brookpark Road in Cleveland, Ohio.”
“What?”
“The purchase location triggered an automatic warning, which is why we are contacting you. Would you like us to put a stop to this transaction and place a hold on your card?”
“Yes!” she said frantically.
Another short pause. “The transaction has been denied and the account placed on hold. We are alerting local authorities of an incident of attempted credit card fraud and providing them with the location.”
Holding the phone between her neck and shoulder, Anita rummaged through her purse, where she found her Visa card. “How can they be using my card?” she asked. “I have it right here.”
“Thieves engaging in identity theft often make their own cards—”
“Is there anything else I need to do?” she interrupted. In her mind, high-tech thieves were simultaneously making online purchases, cleaning out her bank account and opening new lines of exploitable credit using her identity.
“In the event of an identity breach, we suggest that you immediately call the credit monitoring companies Experian, Equifax…”
She stood in the center of the small parking lot, listening to the litany of steps she needed to take to ensure that this attempted identity theft intruded no further into her life, stunned that such a thing could happen.
First Steven, then this…
Could things fall apart any more completely? What was next? Was their house going to be robbed this afternoon? Was the bookstore going to burn down? Was Dr. Wilson going to fire her?
She glanced down at her watch. Her lunch ended in two minutes, and the optometrist was not the most sympathetic person when it came to excuses for being tardy. She hurried inside the building. There was a whole host of things she needed to do in order to protect her financial security. Dr. Wilson glanced at her when he saw her, then glanced up at the clock and then without a word walked down the short hallway to his private office, shutting the door.
There were no patients yet, and Anita commandeered one of the computers, then thought the better of it and used her phone to access the Experian site, then thought the better of that and got a phone number from the website so she could call the credit monitoring company directly. She didn’t trust the security of anything at this point, but she needed to do what the woman had told her and get control of her personal information, not to mention freeze all of her accounts.
“What’s going on?” Jen asked, walking in and putting her purse under the counter. “You look kind of frazzled.”
Anita shook her head. “You won’t believe it.”
“What?”
“Credit card fraud. Someone pretended they were me and tried to charge something. I got a call about it five minutes ago, when I was walking in.”