He looks a little skeevy for a manager, actually. Grace was taught by her mom, at a very early age, about “yellow-light people” and “red-light people.” If someone gives you a creepy feeling, her mom always said, trust that feeling. If they try to take you someplace you don’t want to go, you scream, you holler, you kick, you hit. Do whatever you have to do, but get away from him.

This guy would be a definite red-light person if he wasn’t wearing the shirt and slacks. The clothes are very nice, like what her father wears, but his hair is long, and he has tattoos under the collar of his shirt, as well as peeking out from the cuffs of his sleeves. He keeps a firm grip on her arm.

And he stinks. He absolutely reeks. He smells like a garbage bag stuffed with rotting meat.

“Where are we going?” Grace asks, trying to breathe through her mouth.

“The office,” the man says. “We’re going to call your parents.”

“I can find my dad. He’s around here somewhere — ”

“You should have thought of that before you broke the rules,” the man says, smiling like this is the funniest joke he’s heard in a long time.

He brings her to the side of the building, to a door that says EMPLOYEES ONLY. Nobody else is there.

He passes by that door. “Come on,” he mutters. He keeps a hard grip on her arm.

Grace’s internal alarms are going off full-blast now. “I better go find my dad,” she says.

She starts to pull away. He clenches harder, and begins dragging her toward the back door that says EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY.

Grace knows this is wrong. She fills her lungs to scream, like her mother told her.

But the man does something surprising.

He lets her go.

He kneels down to look her in the eye, and he smiles. “Grace,” he says. Her skin goes cold. He knows her name. He shouldn’t know her name.

She steps back, unsure of what to do.

He points. She follows the line of his finger with a quick glance — she doesn’t want to take her eyes off him for too long — and she sees he is pointing out on the main floor at her dad, who stands there in his bright white polo shirt, arguing with Candace.

“That’s your dad, right? Nice shirt. So clean. Probably expensive, too,” the man says, quiet and calm. “I know you want to call him. I know you want to run back to him. But that’s a bad idea.”

“What?” Grace says. She isn’t quite sure she believes this is real. She feels like she is sinking, like she is going all the way to the deep end of the pool and the pressure is building all around her.

He smiles that not-funny smile again.