The Interview

Anika Patel had once thought a dating profile would be harmless.

It had lasted three weeks.

Long enough for the usual parade of bad photos, awkward openers, and men who called themselves “visionaries” after listing their cars. Long enough for one man in particular to find her real name, her city, and, apparently, the idea that being wealthy was supposed to make him irresistible.

His first message to her read like a sales pitch. He bragged about his net worth, implied she should be honored by his attention, and promised she would never need to work again if she agreed to be with him.

Anika had deleted the profile, blocked him, and moved on with her life.

Or tried to.

He kept returning under new names, new photos, new accounts. The tone never changed, only the disguise. His English was rough, his spelling worse, and his certainty astonishing. Every block was followed by another message. Every shutdown by another attempt.

When he found her on social media, she blocked him there too.

When he found her professional page, she blocked him there as well.

Then came the silence that felt almost worse.

For a while, Anika believed the worst was over. She focused on work, on deadlines, on the small ordinary comforts of a life built carefully and honestly. She did not tell many people how rattled she still felt whenever an unknown number lit up her phone.

Then one morning, her receptionist called her down to the front desk.

A man was there for his interview.

With her.

The words hit her like cold water. She checked the hiring post she had made weeks earlier—an old listing for a direct report, already filled. Somehow he had found it, then twisted it into an excuse to appear in person.

Security removed him before he reached her office.

Anika spent the rest of the day shaking, anger and fear trading places in her chest. Before she left, she arranged for an escort to her car. The thought of him lurking nearby, learning her routine, following her home, made her skin crawl.

She filed a police report the next day.

She brought screenshots. Dates. Messages. The endless cycle of blocked accounts. She showed the officer the profile linked to a workplace in the city, and that detail was enough to begin the unraveling.

The officer visited the company named on the account.

By then, the man’s employers were already alarmed. He had been in the country on a temporary work visa, and their executives did not want a stalker attached to their office building. His contract was terminated.

He had sixty days to find another job.

In the fast-moving engineering network he worked in, everyone heard quickly. References dried up. Calls went unanswered. No one wanted him.

Two days later, he was on a plane back to South Korea.

When law enforcement confirmed his departure, Anika sat in her kitchen and cried with relief so intense it left her exhausted. Not triumph, exactly. Not victory. Just the first unguarded breath she had taken in months.

She still moved carefully after that. She still kept her doors locked and her routines private. She still planned to follow through on the restraining order her lawyer helped her prepare.

But that night, for the first time in a long while, Anika slept without imagining footsteps outside her window.