“You focus on her.”
The car came to a stop.
My hand hovered near the door handle, heart hammering so hard I could feel it in my throat. Everything looked the same as it had that morning.
Ordinary.
Which felt obscene. Sabine was inside. With a man.
The thought jolted something sharp through me.
“Étienne,” I breathed.
Kane was already out of the car, scanning the sidewalk, the parked vehicles, the upper windows. He opened my door and extended a hand without looking at me, instinctive and steady.
I took it.
“Someone needs to call him,” I said quickly, words tumbling over each other. “He thinks she’s missing. He thinks?—”
My voice fractured.
He thinks she’s gone.
Étienne was probably still at the school. Probably pacing. Probably replaying the moment the administrator told him someone had signed her out.
He would be unraveling.
“She’s here,” I insisted, already fumbling for my phone. “He needs to know she’s here. He needs to know she’s safe.”
Safe.
The word caught in my chest as soon as I said it.
Kane’s hand closed gently but firmly around my wrist before I could unlock the screen.
“We don’t know that yet,” he said.
The calm in his voice didn’t match the violence of my pulse.
“The man came here, to Rose’s apartment,” I argued. “Ellsworth said he had a child. That has to be Sabine.”
“It probably is,” Kane agreed.
Probably.
The word felt like ice water.
“But until we walk through that door and see for ourselves,” he continued evenly, “we don’t confirm anything.”
My throat tightened.
“You think he’d hurt her?”
“I think we don’t assume.”
His eyes held mine, steady and unflinching. Not cruel. Not cold. Just anchored in reality.
“If you call Étienne right now and tell him she’s safe,” Kane went on, “and we walk in and the situation is volatile, you’ll have to call him back and say something different.”
