I thought it all made sense at the time. I wasn't terribly concerned: with all the affairs and dares and other nasty games we would play with each other, it merely seemed a natural progression in our idle diversions.
"He's hired a private investigator," I told my sister, Kitty over afternoon tea. She gasped, although I'm sure she wasn't surprised. "Oh yes," I continued, "it's true. I was leaving a meeting with the planning office two days ago when I saw someone taking photos of me from inside a car. Jeffrey must be awfully determined this time."
"Have you done anything about it?" Kitty asked. We sat in the relative privacy in the corner of the dining room, looking over the majestic beauty of the bay whilst sharing little sandwiches and cakes from sliver platters: even here, I was sure we were watched.
"Of course I have. I went out on the town and had raunchy, not-so-discreet relations with a rather stunning twenty-year-old Ukrainian I found at the club." My sister gave me one of those looks. "Don't worry, the photographer was there the whole time."
"But Addie, aren't you afraid? What if Jeffrey is planning on divorcing you?" She dropped her voice, "or worse?"
"Of course he isn't. He'd have no one to play with if he did that. No, I think it's far simpler than that: he's trying to make me feel paranoid, guilty, trying to play on my mind. Well, he won't succeed . . ."
"You know, Addie, I can never work out why you married that man," she said, staring me down over her cup of tea.
"You sound just like Mother when you say that."
We left shortly after and with a glow of satisfaction I noticed the glossy black eye of a zoom lens peering through the window of a parked car. For the first time, I saw the photographer himself. He looked familiar. Shaven bald with a pale, narrow face, his features were peculiarly sharp and his stare penetrating. It was a face you couldn't forget, and I wondered from whose earlier days Jeffrey had found him: his or mine.
And it was flattering, for a while. Every meeting, every lunch with a client, every tryst he was watching me like my own personal paparazzo. I expected the photos to be mailed to me with some sort of demand or for Jeffrey to come home one night and slam the folio down on the dinner table. But the days turned into weeks and still the pale, piercing face with the camera followed me everywhere.
I thought I was stronger than Jeffrey's little mind games but his persistence was worrying me: it wasn't until I flew out to the Gold Coast for a conference that I began to doubt if Jeffrey was behind it at all.
Wanting some peace and some privacy, I went straight to my hotel suite from the airport. I hadn't seen the photographer in the crowd at the terminal and it seemed I was finally free. All the same, I locked the door and pulled the blinds, replacing the warm sun with the dim glow of the lamps. Undressing in the bedroom, I took my toiletries into the bathroom and locking the ensuite door behind me, I stepped into the shower.
The little bathroom soon steamed up, but despite the hot water I was overcome by an icy wave of dread: through the drips on the shower glass I could see a dark figure on the other side. A shutter motor clicked and whirred over the sound of water and I screamed and slipped, my legs sliding from underneath me as I crashed down onto the tiles . . .
I came to and stepped out of the shower. I wrapped myself in the bathrobe, feeling the tender bump on my head and thinking to myself that all the stress was taking its toll. No one could have entered my suite and the bathroom, I reassured myself, not through two locked doors.
I walked through to the bedroom, resolving to order a massage, but on my suitcase sat a manila envelope that wasn't there before. My head throbbed as I picked it up and looked inside.
The photographs. I flicked through them, seeing myself in board meetings and at restaurants with younger men and at afternoon tea with my sister. But they went back further, back to my wedding to Jeffrey, my early career in real estate and my university days of drugs and parties and excess. My heart froze as I saw myself in my high school blazer; myself as a young teen on a skiing holiday in Europe; myself as a little girl playing with Kitty at our parents' beach house. The photos were candid, little snapshots of my life in progress all the way back to my birth.
The last photo was of me, naked and crumpled in the shower with blood flowing from the back of my head, and I realised I could still hear the water running. I gasped and dropped the photos: standing in front of me was the photographer, camera in hand and his eerie, angular face staring into me.
I cried, I begged, I tried to back away, but he grabbed my wrist with a grip as hard and cold as ice. "Come now, Addison. It's time . . . "