Grover found the fourth note under the register drawer, folded twice. "You'll be sorry," it said, in the same block letters as the others. He worked as a clerk at the little grocery on the corner, and someone kept slipping threats into the back office. He had told no one. He wanted to catch the writer first, before the words turned into something worse. The problem was hiding the notes. He kept them stuffed behind the office filing cabinet. But the cabinet moved when the cleaner mopped. Boxes shifted. Anyone with a key could reach behind it. Grover had counted three notes last week. This morning he found only two. One had already vanished. He needed a pattern. Dates, wording, where each note appeared. If a note disappeared before he could study it, he lost the thread. He couldn't leave them in a place his enemy controlled. So he took them home. Grover's apartment sat above a shuttered shopfront, a single room he rented cheap. He unfolded all three surviving notes on his small table. He smoothed each one flat. Then he looked for a spot no one else could reach. The closet held a loose floorboard near the back wall. He had noticed it the day he moved in, when it squeaked under his boot. He pried it up with a butter knife. Beneath it was a shallow gap, dry and empty. He placed the three notes inside. He added a fresh sheet of paper and a pen, so he could log each new one the moment he got home. Date. Location. Exact words. He fitted the board back down and pressed until it sat flush. Grover stood and tested it with his heel. No squeak. Nothing to see. The notes were his now, safe from the cleaner, the mop, the shifting boxes, and whoever kept leaving them. He sat on the floor and read the three again. "You'll be sorry." "Last warning." "I'm watching the store." He lined them up by the day he found each one. A gap of four days. Then two. Then one. The spaces were shrinking. Grover's mouth went dry. He had wanted a pattern, and now he had one. The notes weren't slowing down. They were speeding up. Whoever wrote them was closing in, and the next one would come sooner than the last. He pressed the floorboard once more, though it was already tight. Tomorrow he would open the store like always. He would smile at customers, stock the shelves, ring up bread and milk. And he would watch the back office door, waiting for the fifth note he now knew was coming fast.

The fifth note never came the next morning, but Grover couldn't wait for it. He had the words. He had the block letters. What he didn't have was a single sample of anyone's handwriting to match them against. The notes could belong to any of the dozen people who worked the corner market. Without something to compare, his pattern meant nothing. He needed one person who knew each coworker's hand on sight. That person sat in the back room with the ledgers. Margaret Ledger kept the payroll. Every timesheet, every signed slip, every scrawled note about hours passed under her glasses. If anyone could name a person by their letters, it was her. Grover had barely spoken to her before. She frightened him a little. She noticed everything. He found her at her desk, a pen moving down a column of numbers. She didn't look up. "You're off the clock, Grover," she said. "So this isn't about hours." "No." He set one note on the desk. He had chosen the mildest one. "I found this. I want to know who wrote it." Margaret stopped writing. She lifted the paper to the light. Her eyes moved over each letter, slow and sure, the way she read a timesheet. "Block letters," she said. "People print when they don't want to be known. The curve on the Y is lazy. The crossbar on the T sits high." She set it down. "I can't match block printing to a signature. Nobody can. I'd need the same person printing the same way." Grover's chest tightened. "So you can't tell me who." "Not from this." Then she opened a drawer and pulled out a thin stack of papers. Inventory count sheets. "But I make everyone print their counts. No cursive. Store rule. Every clerk fills these out by hand, in block letters, every week." She spread them across the desk. Grover leaned in. One sheet jumped out at him. The lazy Y. The high crossbar. The same cramped slant. His mouth went dry. He knew the name at the top. Margaret watched his face change. "You know them," she said. It wasn't a question. Grover nodded. He couldn't speak. The writer wasn't a stranger slipping in at night. It was someone he worked beside every shift. Someone who smiled at him over the register. Someone who had been close enough, this whole time, to leave a note and walk away. "Keep that between us," Margaret said. She slid the count sheet toward him. "And Grover. If they wrote 'I'm watching the store,' they meant it. They watch you too." He took the sheet. His hands shook. He had his answer, and it was worse than no answer at all. Now he had a name, and the person who owned it stood on the other side of a door he had to open every morning.