"I saw your performance online, and you totally killed it," Lina told me over the phone the next day as I was driving home. I'd just said goodbye to Joshua, Abigail, and Claire after breakfast and needed to get home to cater to my social media after the big performance last night.

"Thank you, it felt really good," I said to her. "Some family came in from out of town to see the show, it was such a good time. I wish you could have been there."

"I was there in spirit," she assured me. "Have you told your family about this fucking creep?"

"No. I don't want to get them involved and then something happen to them too," I answered her. "I know it's stupid because they could help keep me safe, but I already feel terrible about what happened to you. I can't let that happen to them too."

"Maren, you should tell them," she said. "They really could help. Maybe they could put pressure on the police to keep working on the case, or come stay with you if you don't want to leave the city."

"I know they'd do whatever they could to help catch this guy. That's really why I don't want to tell them, because I know he'll take that as a threat and it would put them in danger," I explained to her. I knew the best decision to catch this motherfucker was to tell my family, but I just couldn't get myself to do it.

"Has he tried to reach out to you lately?" Lina wondered.

"Not in the past few days, it's been really quiet," I told her, not mentioning the weird vibes I was getting from the guy in the blue cap last night because I knew I was just being paranoid. "I want that to be a good thing, but I don't know. Maybe he's planning something big."

"Don't get too in your head," she warned me. "Maybe he's just getting bored. The detective said that engaging in his antics would encourage him to continue. Maybe the fact that you haven't engaged at all has discouraged him and he's giving up."

"Maybe," I sighed, trying to believe her optimism, but I didn't have it in me. I highly doubted that this man who was slashing tires, driving people off the road, tampering with my car, would just give up. It didn't feel right. "How's Cleveland?"

"Well, I do love being doted on hand and foot by my parents, but this cast is killing me. My entire leg itches all of the time, these crutches suck ass. But I have been doing a ton of songwriting. We should have a brain melding session soon so that I can bounce some off of you. I need your lyrical genius brain to look some of these over."

"Sure, let's do that. I have some new songs I can run by you too," I agreed with her as I pulled into the front parking lot of my apartment building.

"I have to go, I can feel myself about to need to pee, and it's going to take me fifteen minutes to get into position," she warned me with a sarcastic laugh and then a grunt as it sounded like she began moving.

"Okay, I'll talk to you later. Get better fast, okay? I miss you."

"I miss you too," she responded before the call ended. I turned the car off and headed inside. The most dreaded part of arriving to my apartment has been checking my mailbox in the lobby before heading upstairs.

There were no packages left for me, which was a major relief, but when I used my mail box key to open the small box with my apartment number stuck to the front, I was greeted by a thick stack of photos. No envelope, stamps, packaging. Just photos.

The top photo of the stack was a picture from last night when I was dancing with Abigail at the music hall after my set. A sticky note resting on top of the photo read 'You look just like your sister' with a drawing of a lamb on the bottom.

I never thought I'd get to a point in my life where I'd start carrying rubber gloves around with me in my purse, but that was what this person had done to me. To avoid contaminating anything with finger prints, I grabbed a new pair of gloves from the box I kept in my large bag and slide them onto my hands to grab the pictures from the mailbox.

Previously, I had stopped entertaining his gifts and letters by immediately taking unopened boxes to the detective. I wondered if that was why they didn't package these and placed them directly into the mailbox, so that I'd be forced to face them.

Against my better judgment, I started flipping through the photos. Some more from the show last night, there were some of me working at the diner and walking to my car after playing at the Jackroller. Pictures of me going into my apartment building, walking into Manny's office, talking to David and Andrea, even having conversations with Ron and Desi in the lobby of the building.

They all seemed to be taken from far away, maybe with a good zoom lens on a camera, through windows or from across the street. The thought of this person being so near me at any time of day at any location made my blood curdle. Was the note a threat to my sister? Or was he just trying to scare me enough to make sure I didn't tell them what was happening? Whatever his intent, it was working.

I looked through the entire stack of invasive pictures by the time I climbed the stairs and maneuvered my key through the door lock to get into my apartment. I would have to take the pictures into Detective Andrea later that day, but wanted to at least get changed into new clothes and shower.

I heard myself screaming before I even realized what was happening, dropping the images from my hands to scatter onto the ground around me. The walls of my apartment that were usually a plain white plaster were now covered in pictures of me like it was a new wallpaper.

That alone was enough to make my body feel weak, nauseous, and cold. My hands started trembling and the sense of terror that was becoming so familiar to me started to shake my bones. However, the feeling intensified when I got closer to the pictures on the walls to realize that they weren't like the ones in the mailbox.

These pictures were grainy, blurry, low quality pictures of me in my own apartment. Sitting and watching TV, eating dinner, playing my guitar. Undressing, showering, sleeping.

"Is everything okay?" I heard Desi entering the opened apartment door behind me before she gasped and then said, "What the fuck."

I couldn't move from where I stood, couldn't turn to look at her or speak. I just stood frozen, broken, and catatonic. There were pictures from before I even received the first letter in my PO box, I could tell by the length of my hair and the brief phase of wearing chokers all the time that happened about a month before the first letter.

"Who did this?" Desi asked when I didn't respond to her.

"I... I have no idea," I admitted in a shaking and coarse voice.

"Stop looking at them," she insisted, starting to pull me toward the door where we were greeted by Ron starting to walk in. Before he could turn the corner into my apartment, she pushed him out and said, "Don't go in there."

"I heard screaming," he said, sounding concerned.

After pulling me completely out of the room, Desi shut the door to my apartment, separating all three of us from the nightmare that was inside. "Come stay with me, we'll call the police," she said to me, pretty much ignoring Ron, but he still followed us into Desi's apartment where the baby was sleeping in his crib and the toddler was quietly watching cartoons.

"What's going on?" Ron asked once we were all in her apartment with the door closed and locked.

"I'll call," I said loudly when Desi started dialing something on her phone. I figured she was probably calling 911 when I thought it'd be a better idea to call Andrea directly. "I need to call the detective."

I tried calling Andrea's number, but it went to her voicemail and I had to leave a message. I knew that she was a busy woman with a chaotic job and I wasn't her only case, but it was frustrating that she would rarely answer her phone. I knew that calling the cops would prolong this event because I'd have to wait for them to get here, document everything and ask me questions before the pictures were taken down.

However, I decided to call anyway because I needed it to be documented. I'd rather just clean it up on my own and get it over with.

I felt safer with my two neighbors there to comfort me and just be there, but it didn't stop the entire world from spinning around me until I had to carry myself into Desi's bathroom to throw up as she filled in Ron about what happened.

I couldn't get those images of my bare tits out of my head. Walking around my apartment naked after a shower without any idea at all that somebody may be watching my every move. And now, any officer that responded to the call would see those images too. I wanted to go back and rip the explicit ones off of the walls, but knew it would be better to not mess with a scene.

"Whoever did that is a sick fuck," Desi told me once I emerged from the bathroom. She handed me a bottle of water and said, "Why would anybody do that to you?"

I shrugged my shoulders as I started sipping the water that helped sooth the acidic burn in my throat. "I don't know. I found some pictures in my mailbox and thought that was all."

"You know, I saw some guy at your mailbox earlier," Ron informed me. "I thought it was weird because I didn't recognize him, but just figured maybe you got a boyfriend or something."

"What did he look like?" Desi asked for me as she departed to the crib to check on her calm baby across the room.

I felt slightly hopeful that maybe there was a witness, and felt it was kind of funny that I was getting help from Ron, of all people. The most unaware, ditzy person I'd ever met. Sometimes when we spoke, I could tell that he was pretty smart though, under all of the drugs that have wrecked his brain.

"Kinda short, I guess," he said with an uninterested shrug as Desi occupied herself by cooing to her baby. "A big older guy, pretty round. He had a goatee. Didn't seem like your type, but thought maybe you were going for a sugar baby situation or something."

A bigger guy, older, with a goatee. I immediately thought about Gabe.

He was always nicer to me than he was to all of the other waiters and waitresses. He asked me about my life, talked about his own, made me feel comfortable around him. He'd always seemed so nice and gentle, but was that all an act so that I wouldn't suspect him capable of doing all of the things he'd done to me?

It took the officers a long time to clear out the pictures and then search the apartment for hidden cameras. I stayed with Desi and Ron in her apartment the entire time with an officer who asked me questions about where I was last night, who knew I'd be spending the night at the hotel with my sister. Ron told them what he told us about seeing a man at the mailbox and I informed the officer that his description matched Gabe to a tee.

I had no idea why Gabe would do this to me, or how he could have gotten so much information. I didn't care so much about knowing the details of his fucked up plan, I felt more relieved than anything, knowing that at least we had a real name to go off of.

A face to the Mrs. Lamb identity, and an end in sight.

"We found a camera in the lamp of your bathroom," one of the officers informed me after the search and collection was finished. "And another in your smoke detector. We were very thorough with the search, so there aren't any more cameras in there, other than the ones you installed."

"You have cameras too? That's good, right?" Desi piped up. "Can you see what's on there?"

"Maren gave us her camera credentials, so we pulled up the footage and this is all that we got," the detective handed me an iPad with footage from the camera I installed that faced the front door. For a moment, the footage was uneventful but all of the sudden, the door was opening just a crack.

I felt my breath hitch, as if it was happening in real time. Just a black-gloved hand appeared through the crack in the door and suddenly, a beam of light started shining toward the camera. The hand held the laser directly on the camera for what felt like a few minutes until it flickered and the screen went blank.

"Lasers can melt the sensor, we think he used his own live camera feed to be able to see where the laser was pointing without showing his face," she continued. "We're going to take a look at the cameras we found, maybe we can track those to who bought them."

"What about the pictures? Can you try to find finger prints or something?" I asked the officer, trying to remain calm but all I could think was that he had just seen hundred of pictures of my naked body.

"That'll be up to the detective, but probably not," he said, sounding somewhat uninterested in the situation. Was this really just a boring, ordinary, kind of visit that he encountered in his day to day job? I was just another vulnerable girl with a creep who taped camera footage of me onto my own walls? "Our analysis team is already backed up."

"Okay, well what do I do?" I asked her as tears started to fill my eyes. The system was backed up, and this wasn't a priority. There were murders to solve, robberies and other crimes. Maybe they'd decide to run the photos for prints after there really was a murder here. "Just go back in there like nothing happened?"

"You should get a gun," Ron suggested.

"I don't know how to use a gun."

"Seems like now's a pretty good time to learn," he responded.

"Maybe he's right," Desi added in agreement. "If somebody did something like that to me, I'd want to shoot the heck out of them."

Officer Daniels gave Desi an alarmed look, but the moment was cut short when the baby started crying and Desi sprang to her feet to cater to her son.

Taking the two boxes of photos with them, the three bored officers left pretty soon after. Ron went back to his apartment, but I remained unmoved on Desi's couch.

"Let me make you lunch," she piped just as the baby was quieting down.

"I can't eat," I said. My stomach was so queasy, even after drinking the entire bottle of water, I felt like I'd throw up anything that I tried to eat.

"You need to, Maren," she said in a soft voice, moving from the crib toward the kitchen. "I'll make something light, it'll ease your stomach."

While Desi made lunch and I sat beside the toddler watching cartoons, I tried to think of all of the things I'd told Gabe about my life while I waited on him at the diner. Or anything that I'd done to him that would make him want to make my life a living hell. Even with a suspect, I still felt so lost and confused.

Just twelve hours ago, I was feeling the safest I'd felt in so long, but then I suddenly felt the most vulnerable, the most violated and scared I'd ever been. I was starting to enjoy my break from Mrs. Lamb, maybe believing that Lina was right when she said he was getting bored.

It was exhausting to hold out hope for an outcome that wasn't coming. Still, I remained hopeful that having a name and description would put an end to all of this. But then, even if Andrea was able to arrest Gabe, would I really feel safe? Even if Mrs. Lamb is behind bars, never to be able to contact me again, would that really cure the insomnia and anxiety this has caused me?

Would I ever truly feel safe again?