I drive east on Division, scanning every doorway, every bench, every figure moving through the predawn dark. The city is sparse at this hour—delivery trucks, a few night-shift workers, the scattered insomniacs and homeless who populate sidewalks between midnight and dawn.
She's not at the bus terminal. Not at the laundromat. Not at the diner.
I'm about to call Finn and escalate this to a full-scale search when my phone buzzes.
Not a call. A ping. The burner's GPS.
She's twelve blocks southeast. Stationary.
I drive too fast. Blow two red lights. The streets are empty enough that it doesn't matter, and if it did, I wouldn't care.
The GPS leads me to a strip of storefronts between Ashland and Damen—a dry cleaner, a check-cashing place, a nail salon, all shuttered and dark. She's in the recessed doorway of the dry cleaner, sitting on the concrete step with her duffel bag between her knees.
I park across the street and kill the engine.
For a moment I don't move. I grip the wheel hard enough to feel the leather groan under my palms and stare at her through the windshield.
She's holding the burner phone in both hands, staring at the screen. At my text. She hasn't called back, hasn't replied, but she hasn't kept walking either.
She stopped.
I get out of the car and cross the street. My boots are loud on the empty pavement. She hears me coming—I watch her spine go rigid, her head lifting, her body tensing into that posture I've memorized. Fight or flight. Threat assessment. Cataloging the approaching figure—height, width, gait, hands.
Her gaze finds mine under the streetlight, and she goes still.
I stop six feet away. Close enough to see her face. Far enough that she doesn't feel cornered.
Her eyes are red. Her jaw is set. Her grip on the duffel strap is white-knuckled. She's not crying—Saoirse’s not a crier—but the evidence of tears is there in the raw pink around her eyes and the muscle working in her jaw.
I open my mouth and nothing comes out. My throat has closed. Every speech I rehearsed in the car—the explanations, the clarifications, the tactical breakdown of the Sullivan threat—it's all gone. Wiped clean by the sight of my wife sitting in a doorway with a garbage bag's worth of belongings, ready to disappear into the city that almost swallowed her once already.
She speaks first.
"Go home, Declan."
"No."
"I heard you." Her voice is steady and raw. "At dinner. In the dining room. You told your brothers you couldn't stand it anymore. You said you had to get me out of here."
The ground drops out from under me.
She overheard me? Whatever she heard, clearly she interpreted every word wrong. Of course she did, she sees things through the lens of a girl who has been sent away fourteen times.
My knees almost buckle. I press one hand against the brick wall beside me and force air into my lungs.
“What you heard was out of context. You heard me say that, but you didn’t hear the rest.”
"I heard enough."
"You didn't hear enough. You heard snippets of a conversation and filled in the rest with every shitty thing that's ever happened to you."
Her chin lifts. Defiant, wounded, braced for impact. "Tell me I'm wrong."
"You're wrong." I step closer. She doesn't retreat, but her body tightens, every tendon bracing. “Listen, the Sullivans, a rival family, has been threatening our operations. The threats are escalating. Four attacks in two weeks—warehouses burned, trucks hijacked, a car bomb in someone's driveway. Cillian believes they might come at us through our women next."
Confusion creases her forehead. Not the reaction she was expecting.
"I wasn't sending you away because I don't want you. I was sending you to a safe house because I can't—" My voice cracks. I stop. Breathe. Try again. "Because you are the only thing in my life I cannot afford to lose. And if the Sullivans hurt you to get to me, I will never recover."
