occurred after Melissa’s breakup from Dirk. Why would Shanna continue with her strange stalking of Melissa? Shanna had initially picked on her because she was jealous of her relationship with Dirk. But Shanna was well aware of the divorce and knew Melissa was no longer an obstacle. Why was she continuing with her campaign to harass her? The one shimmering lining in the dark cloud of Melissa’s divorce was her knowledge that she’d be free of the stalker who had kept her on edge for nearly half a decade. But Shanna was not yet done with her. “I always thought she was going to leave me alone after I was no longer with Dirk because I thought that was the reason for the stalking. But she kept at it. After I found out she had used my name, I was worried about identity theft, so I signed up for identity-theft protection.”
The program Melissa chose made it easy for her to check her own credit history for discrepancies. “I recognized everything on the report, except for one thing. A year prior someone had opened an account for a five-hundred-dollar credit line. It was maxed out, and nothing was ever paid. Then the account was closed.” It was a black mark on Melissa’s otherwise perfect credit. “I looked up the company online and saw it sold cleaning supplies.” For a fraction of an instant she wondered if Shanna was the thief but quickly dismissed the idea. “It could have been anybody. I couldn’t think of any reason why Shanna would need five-hundred-dollars’ worth of cleaning supplies.”
Years later she learned Shanna had started a house-cleaning business, and only then would she realize her stalker had used her credit, but at the time she discovered the fraud she had no evidence of that. Melissa never saw a bill for the unpaid debt. “My guess is that she used my name, my information, but her address, so I was never aware I was being charged for those things.”
Melissa moved in with her mom after her breakup with Dirk. One of the more peculiar things occurred about a year and a half after the divorce. Dirk was picking up their son when he mentioned, “Oh, Shanna said that she saw you at the grocery store, and she says, ‘Congratulations.’”
Melissa regarded him quizzically. “Excuse me?”
“Shanna says you’re pregnant.”
“I can assure you, I’m not pregnant!”
“She just wanted me to tell you that.”
“Okay!” said Melissa. “Whatever.” She forgot about the odd exchange until three weeks later when a package arrived for her in her mother’s mailbox. It was a sample from an infant formula company, and more samples began to arrive regularly. Puzzled, she phoned the company and asked why she was on their mailing list. She was told, “You signed up online for free monthly samples.”
“I’m sorry for the misunderstanding,” Melissa said. “But I didn’t sign up to get samples. I don’t have a baby and have no use for formula.” The company representative thanked her for calling and said they’d remove her from the list. She tried to shrug it off as a mistake. “But about two months later, I started getting the samples again!” Could Shanna be behind it? She had, after all, made a point to ask Dirk to congratulate her on her nonexistent pregnancy just weeks before the first formula packet arrived.
Melissa didn’t want to jump to paranoid conclusions. “I thought maybe it was a fluke.” Still, she couldn’t overcome the eerie sensation that someone was watching. If Shanna was behind the formula confusion that would mean she knew Melissa’s parents’ address. How would she know that Melissa was living with her mother, and how would she know the address? Could Shanna have followed her there? The idea heightened Melissa’s anxiety. She couldn’t drive to the grocery store without glancing in her rearview mirror to see if she was being followed. If a strange car turned when she did, her heart dropped a beat, and she held her breath until she could be certain Shanna was not behind the wheel of the vehicle on her tail.
It had been a long time since Melissa could relax without worrying someone was watching. Craving tranquility, she rented a cute studio apartment on the top floor of a high security building. She would continue to live with her mother on the days she had her son, but now she had a cozy nest she could escape to when Craig was with Dirk. She didn’t tell Dirk about her