Chapter 55: Another Pair Of Eyes
Liam didn’t leave. The bus hissed to a stop behind him, doors folding shut, and pulled away without him.
He hadn’t decided to stay because he expected the man to come back the shopkeeper had already told him the morning visit was the whole routine, same as every other day.
He stayed because a few more minutes near the building might tell him something the receptionist and the binder hadn’t.
He crossed back to the convenience store instead of the café, bought a second bottle of water he didn’t need, and lingered near the window where he could watch the street without watching it directly.
"Back again," the owner said, not looking up from restocking a shelf."Guess I like the water here."
The old man snorted. "It’s tap water in a bottle. Don’t lie to an old man." He straightened, wiping his hands on his apron. "You still thinking about that fella from this morning?"
"Little bit. Anything else you remember about him? Doesn’t have to matter."
The owner thought about it, scratching his jaw. "He limps a little. Left side. Not bad you’d miss it if you weren’t looking. Lanyard under his collar most days. Never seen the badge, just the cord."
Small things. But small things were usually the only things that mattered in the end.
He thanked the old man and settled in, not waiting for anything specific, just giving the street time to show him whatever it was going to show him.
An hour passed with nothing in it worth writing down. Shift workers came and went from a diner two doors down.
A traffic warden ticketed a car twice without anyone coming to move it. The light shifted slowly from white to gold, and the shadows off the old brick building started stretching further across the pavement than they had that morning.
Somewhere in the stretch of doing nothing, Liam’s mind wandered where it usually did when he let his guard down.
Phone already half out of his pocket to check the bus times, when he saw him the same jacket, the same dark-framed glasses. Liam lowered the phone slowly, more out of disbelief than caution.
Across the street, the shopkeeper had seen him too. The broom stopped mid-sweep. "Funny," he said. "Never seen him come twice in one day."He was here this morning.
"I know. I watched him do it." The old man shook his head and went back to sweeping, already losing interest, the way ordinary people did with things that weren’t their business.
Liam kept his eyes on the street. A routine didn’t change without a reason people didn’t wake up one day and decide, for no cause at all, to break a habit they’d kept for two months.
Someone had changed it. The only question was whether that someone had done it because of something Liam had already set in motion, or something else entirely he hadn’t found yet.
He left a few bills on the counter and stepped out, letting a delivery van roll between them before crossing the street.
The man moved north with more purpose than he had that morning shorter strides, less drifting, the walk of someone who’d been told to be somewhere rather than someone killing time.
Liam followed at a distance, matching pace without matching rhythm, letting the ordinary rush of the evening crowd swallow the gap between them.
Two blocks in, the man slowed outside a tailor’s shop and stopped to study the window display, hands in his pockets, in no apparent hurry despite the pace he’d just kept. Liam walked past on the opposite side rather than break his own stride, careful to look like a man checking his phone and nothing more.
Only after he’d already gone by did he understand what he’d seen. The man’s eyes had never actually settled on the suits in the window.
They’d stayed fixed on the reflection behind them the street, the cars, the handful of people still moving along the sidewalk.He was checking who was still moving.
Liam didn’t stop walking, but he turned into the nearest doorway a moment later a shuttered dry cleaner’s, deep enough to swallow him from view and waited three full seconds before glancing back out, his pulse a fraction quicker than normal.
The man had already resumed walking, giving no sign he’d caught anything.The schedule had changed. Whether by chance or by instruction, Liam couldn’t say yet. Either way, he intended to find out why.
He gave it another block before closing the distance again, keeping to storefronts and crosswalks, never letting himself become the only other person on a stretch of empty sidewalk.
Six blocks north, the man crossed into a parking structure attached to a mid-rise office building glass and steel, indistinguishable from a dozen others nearby, the kind of building that existed to be forgotten the moment you walked past it. Liam hung back at the corner and let his eyes travel up the building’s face, floor by floor, until they landed on a lit window on the eighth level, blinds half-drawn, a shape moving briefly behind the glass before vanishing again.
No plaque by the entrance told him anything. No directory he could read from the street. Just a number, glimpsed once on the elevator display through the lobby glass before the doors closed.
*8.*
He didn’t move closer. Walking in to be seen by whoever waited on that floor was the fastest way to turn a quiet afternoon into a mistake he couldn’t undo, and being noticed now was the one thing he genuinely couldn’t afford.
Instead he stood where he was and pulled out his notebook, adding a single line beneath the growing list of names.
*Eighth floor. Routine broke today. Find out why.*
No company name yet. No neat answer waiting to be copied down. Just a floor number, and the growing certainty that whatever had shifted the man’s schedule today had happened because of something Liam himself had done.
He closed the notebook and started back toward the bus stop, keeping the same unhurried pace he’d kept all day, the street around him already sliding back into its ordinary evening rhythm as if nothing about it had ever been worth watching.
Somewhere behind him, there was a decent chance someone watched him from the shadows and curious why a young man Will spent the afternoon a little too interested in an empty office.
If that was true, the game had already changed shape.He wasn’t just the one watching anymore.He might already be the one being watched.