The door clicked shut behind Asher and the quiet that followed felt strange. Not peaceful, but stretched thin like something was waiting just beyond the walls. Eric stayed close without crowding me, and I could feel the heat of him at my side. The safety I should have felt in this cabin refused to settle. My skin was still buzzing from adrenaline.
I pressed my hands together to stop the tremble. “I feel like I’m unraveling.”
Eric’s voice softened. “You’re allowed to feel that way.”
Allowed.
The word hit harder than he knew. I had spent so much of my life bracing for reactions, for anger, for consequences. Feeling anything out loud had never been safe. Now it frightened me for a different reason. What if letting myself feel made everything I had been holding back crash through the surface?
I sat on the edge of the bed and breathed slowly until the room stopped spinning. Through the window, I could still see Asher’s silhouette near the road. He stood with a kind of restless stillness that reminded me of someone waiting for a storm they already knew was coming. Pierre raised sons who could sensedanger before anyone else noticed it. No wonder they were all reacting the way they were.
Eric crouched in front of me. His hands rested lightly on my knees. “Tell me what you need.”
I wanted to tell him I needed everything. I needed sleep. I needed time. I needed the past to let go of me for once. But all those things felt too heavy to say out loud, so I focused on the smallest truth I could manage.
“I need to understand what’s happening. I need to know why Tremblay was here.”
Eric nodded. “We’ll figure it out. Knowing Becket, he won’t rest until he has an answer.”
He said it with certainty, but even he couldn’t hide the tension in his eyes. The worry was new. Before, Eric carried his feelings quietly. Now the fear was right there in the open, and it was for me. My gaze drifted toward the table where the crushed thistle lay. The sight of it still made my stomach twist. It had been on the cabin windowsill for who knew how long. Watching me. Watching us. The thought sent a cold shiver through my body.
I leaned back a little. “Do you really think someone is following me? I keep thinking there has to be another explanation.”
“There might be,” he said. “But right now, the signs point to someone who wants to keep you scared and off balance.”
The truth of it settled like a weight inside me. My father’s world had always felt distant since his arrest, like something sealed behind glass. Now the glass felt cracked. Eric moved to sit beside me, and when his shoulder brushed mine, relief flooded me in a way I did not expect.
“You’re not alone,” he’d repeated that line a few times now, it almost sounded like a mantra.
I swallowed; my throat tight. “I keep waiting for this to blow over, but every time I think it’s quiet, something else happens.”
“That’s why we handle it piece by piece. One thing at a time,” he assured.
We sat like that for a few minutes, our breathing the only sound in the room. Outside, the orchard wind shifted, brushing against the cabin walls as if trying to get inside. Then it hit me. A memory I had been pushing down since the trial.
“There’s something else,” I said softly.
Eric’s attention sharpened. “Tell me.”
“When I turned in the files, the officer I gave them to told me something that never made sense at the time. He said another name kept appearing in the logs. Not Vesper. Someone else. Someone who ran through the shadows of the same network. Someone older than Vesper. Smarter. More patient.”
“What name?” Eric asked.
“I never saw it. He was never allowed to show me. He only hinted it was a ghost account, something dormant until suddenly it wasn’t. He said someone had been cleaning up digital footprints. He was trying to get the name out of me, but I had no idea who it could be. It sounded important.”
Eric stiffened beside me. “Cleaning up Marcel’s mess.”
“And mine,” I said. “Anything that tied back to me. Some of the threads I saved were gone by the time the police tried to trace them.”
Eric exhaled slowly.
“Someone knows I kept copies,” I said with a shiver because what I had done was equal to my execution if I didn’t act fast enough to end my father. I had managed to get my father behind bars, but I underestimated how easy it would be for him to get out and how angry Olivier would be with me for putting him there.
Before Eric could respond, my phone buzzed on the table. A single vibration. Not loud, but sharp enough to slice through the quiet. My heart lurched. Eric reached it before I could. He checked the screen and his expression darkened.
Unknown sender.
Encrypted attachment.
