She closes her eyes briefly. When she opens them, there’s a new sharpness in her expression. “How do you know she’s in preschool?” A beat. “How do you know her name?”
I keep my eyes on the road.
“Nikolai.”
“I’ve been watching over you,” I say carefully. “Both of you. Making sure you were safe.”
The silence that follows is worse than any response she could have given me. When she finally speaks, some of the fire has banked into something more tired. More honest. “How long do you think this will take?”
“I don’t know.” I glance in the mirror at Hannah, who has rested her head against the window, clutching her seat belt with both hands. Our daughter, who doesn’t know I exist. “This is Ronan Aslanov. We both know what he’s capable of.” I shoot her a look. “I wouldn’t be doing this if I had any other choice.”
Lauren nods slowly. A grudging acceptance, born not of forgiveness but of practicality. She’s choosing Hannah over her anger, grief, sadness, the same way she always has.
The distance between us is vast. Four years of silence and secrets and grief have built walls I don’t know how to dismantle. And underneath my guilt, underneath the laser focus of keeping them alive, something else stirs—the sharp, aching recognition of everything I gave up. Of how much I’m still drawn to her.
She’s still her. Despite everything that happened, she’s still the woman who walked into my world and refused to be intimidated by any of it.
But this isn’t about what I want.
It’s about making sure they live long enough for me to earn the right to want anything at all.
Chapter Eight
Lauren
Gravel crunches beneath the tires as we slow to a stop.
I peer through the windshield into darkness. Trees everywhere, their shapes barely visible against the night sky.
“This is it,” Nikolai says.
My chest tightens. I was expecting a house. Maybe on the outskirts of the city, somewhere with neighbors, with streetlights. Not this. The forest presses in from all sides, so dense I can barely see past the first row of trunks.
The isolation hits me like a physical thing.
Crickets pulse in the darkness. Something rustles in the underbrush and I instinctively reach back to check if Hannah’s door is locked.
“Mommy?” Hannah’s voice is small. “Where are we?”
I turn to look at Nikolai, waiting for him to answer. He shifts in his seat, engaging the parking brake. The headlights illuminate a structure ahead—a cabin tucked between the trees.
“Wow!” Hannah sounds more awake now. “Is that a treehouse?”
“It’s a cabin,” Nikolai says, his voice softening slightly when he addresses her. “A log cabin.”
“Cool!”
I’m glad she can still find wonder in something tonight. After everything she’s seen.
I unbuckle and step out into the night air. It’s cooler here, away from the city. The forest sounds are louder than I expected—crickets, leaves rustling, the distant call of something I can’t identify. Moonlight filters weakly through the canopy, creating scattered patches of silver on the ground.
It’s remote. Which I suppose is the point.
“This is just for tonight.” Nikolai appears beside me. “Tomorrow we leave for Chicago.”
Chicago.
The word doesn’t quite register. I’m still trying to process that we’re standing in the middle of nowhere, that there was a man in my apartment trying to—
