Chapter 187 How Long Have You Been Watching

Chapter 187 How Long Have You Been Watching
I stared at the notification, my thumb hovering over it, dread pooling low in my stomach.

"That's not possible," Josh said again, moving closer to look at my screen, his own confusion sounding genuine, raw. "You were never added to that chat, Abby. I would have seen it. I've been watching that thread for weeks."

"Then explain this," I said, turning the phone toward him.

'Whitaker Family Watch — 1 new message.'

The preview line sat beneath it, small and clipped, cut off before the full sentence could display.

'She already knows about the chat. Someone needs to—'

I opened it before Josh could stop me.

The message loaded fully, and my stomach turned to ice.

'She already knows about the chat. Someone needs to make sure she doesn't go public with what she's found before we're ready.'

Beneath it, a second message, posted only seconds after the first.

'Agreed. Contain it tonight.'

"Contain it," Beth read aloud, horror creeping into her voice. "Contain what? Contain her?"

I scrolled up frantically, trying to understand how any of this was possible, and found the answer almost immediately — a change log, buried in the chat's settings, showing a new member added less than ten minutes ago.

'Abigail Thompson added by Unknown Admin.'

"Someone added me on purpose," I said slowly, the realization landing with sickening clarity. "Just now. While we were standing here arguing. Someone in that chat is watching us right now, in real time, and decided the moment I found out about it was the moment to pull me in directly."

"That means someone's here," Josh said, his voice dropping, his eyes darting toward the chapel's single window, toward the door still standing slightly ajar from Beth's entrance. "Physically here, close enough to know exactly what just happened between us."

Beth's eyes darted toward the small window set high in the chapel wall, its glass old and slightly warped, the darkness beyond it giving nothing away.

"How would they even know about tonight specifically," she said slowly. "The exact moment, the exact conversation. Unless—" She stopped, her face going pale.

"Unless someone's had eyes on me for longer than tonight," I finished quietly. "Not just watching the chat. Watching me. In person. For a while."

I thought of the note left at my gate weeks ago. The camera hidden among the fairy lights in my old bedroom. The feeling I'd carried since waking up in that hospital bed that I was never truly alone, no matter how empty a room appeared to be.

A chill swept through the small chapel that had nothing to do with the night air.

"Or watching through someone who is," I conitnued, my mind racing back through every person who'd been in this building tonight: Chloe, Leah, Elder Ezekiel, Beth had seen them leaving the parking lot. Any one of them could still be close enough to see, to report back, to feed information into a chat that apparently now had eyes directly on me.

My phone buzzed again in my hand.

A private message this time, separate from the group thread, from an account with no name attached — just a blank profile picture and a string of numbers where a username should have been.

'You shouldn't have looked, Abigail. Some things are safer left unread. For your own sake, and for the sake of people you actually care about.'

I read it twice, my hands trembling now, fear finally cutting through the anger that had carried me through the last twenty minutes.

"Who sent that," Beth said, reading over my shoulder, her voice barely above a whisper.

I stared at the string of digits where a name should have been, something about the pattern tugging at a memory I couldn't fully place — not a face, not a voice, just a vague, uneasy familiarity, like a phone number you've dialed once and half-remember without knowing why.

"Wait," I said slowly. "I think I've seen numbers like this before."

"Where?" Beth asked.

I closed my eyes, chasing the fragment, but it slipped away the moment I reached for it directly, dissolving back into the fog the way most of my memory still did whenever I needed it most.

"I don't know," I admitted, frustration cracking through the fear. "It's gone. But it felt familiar. That has to mean something."

Josh went very still, his eyes fixed on the string of numbers on my screen for a beat too long.

"Josh?" I said. "What is it?"

"Nothing," he said quickly, too quickly, the same careful evasion I'd caught from him not twenty minutes earlier, before everything unraveled. He caught my expression and exhaled hard. "I'm sorry. Old habit. I swear it's nothing I recognize. I just..." he sighed deeply, looking defated, "after tonight, I don't trust myself to say 'that's nothing' anymore without you doubting it."

"Good instinct," I said quietly, though something in the brief hesitation still sat uneasily in my chest, a small crack in the fragile trust we'd only just begun rebuilding.

Josh's jaw tightened, something calculating moving behind his eyes now, all the earlier desperation replaced by a sharper, more focused urgency. "We need to leave," he said. "Right now. If someone's close enough to add you to that chat in real time, close enough to send a threat within seconds of you reading it, they're not just watching from a distance, Abby. They're here. Tonight. In this building, or close enough to it that it doesn't matter."

"What about Chloe and Leah?" Beth asked. "They left before this started."

"Then it's not them doing this specifically," Josh said. "Which means someone else has been in this chat the whole time. Someone we haven't accounted for."

I looked down at the message again, the cold, careful precision of it, the specific mention of 'people you actually care about' — not a vague threat, but something aimed with intention, someone who knew exactly which words would land hardest.

I thought of Eli, still recovering in that hospital bed. Of my mother, still carrying whatever fear had cracked her composure completely on live television. Of Beth and Josh, standing beside me right now in a chapel that suddenly felt far less safe than it had ten minutes ago.

'People you actually care about.'

"We need to go," I said, my voice steadying despite the fear coursing through me. "Now."

We moved toward the chapel door together, Josh in front, Beth's hand gripping mine tightly.

The old wooden floor creaked beneath our combined weight, the sound absurdly loud in the tense silence, and for one suspended moment none of us moved — all three of us listening, straining to hear anything beyond the chapel walls that might explain how someone had known, in real time, exactly what we'd just discovered.

Nothing. 

Just the wind against the old window glass.

And just as we reached the threshold, my phone buzzed one final time.

I looked down despite every instinct telling me not to.

One more message. From the same blank, numbered account.

'Too late.'