The study. The legal pad. The phone.
The amended SEAS timeline had been filed. The cease-and-desist was drafted. Jax had a man on the access road and daily reports started tomorrow. Mike had the resource reallocation in motion. Cheryl had copied me on a memo to the SEAS team about “internal restructuring” that positioned the accelerated timeline as an operational decision, not a reactive one.
Everything was locked down. Everything was handled. Every angle covered, every vulnerability sealed, every possible point of entry for Richard Sterling accounted for and fortified against.
I picked up my phone and opened the Shaw Security app. The Aspen property map loaded—green perimeter, the access road marked, the position of Jax’s guy blinking at the property line. I zoomed out. The mountain. The road. The town. Everything in a radius around this house, monitored and measured and contained.
Upstairs, Charlie slept. She didn’t know about the map. She didn’t know about Kessler’s email or the amended timeline or the man at the access road. She didn’t know that the project she’d built from nothing had been restructured today by someone who wasn’t her. She didn’t know that every wall I was building was a wall she couldn’t see.
I told myself she didn’t need to know. Not yet. Not until there was something definitive, something beyond emails and browsing patterns and the cold certainty in my gut that said Richard Sterling was not going to stop.
I told myself I was doing what needed to be done. That the threat was real. That she’d understand, when the time came, that every decision I’d made was the right one.
Shane’s voice, from the doorway three hours ago: “He was never wrong about the facts. He was wrong about the part where he didn’t ask.”
I closed the app. Set the phone face-down on the desk. Sat in the dark study with the mountain cold pressing against the windows and the sound of the house settling around me and the woman upstairs who trusted me, and I thought: this is different. This is not what Shane thinks it is. There is an actual threat and I am handling it and she is safe and her work is safe and when this is over she’ll see that.
She’ll see.
The phone buzzed. Face-down. I turned it over. Jax.
One line: Sterling booked a flight to Aspen. Arrives Thursday.
I stared at the screen until it went dark. Then I picked up the legal pad, added three more items to the list, and reached for the phone.
It was midnight. Charlie was asleep in my bed. The house was quiet except for the scratch of my pen and the low hum of the call connecting.
18
CHARLIE
Ineeded to get out of the house.
Not because anything was wrong. Everything was aggressively right—Asher making eggs (still terrible, still endearing), Mia and Shane bickering about something involving a podcast and a deeply held disagreement about whether audiobooks counted as reading, and the mountain light pouring through the windows like it was auditioning for a tourism campaign. The house was full of people I cared about and coffee I didn’t have to make and a man who kissed the top of my head when he passed me in the kitchen, casually, like he’d been doing it for years instead of days.
That was the problem. It felt like years instead of days. And I needed an hour that was mine—not ours, not the house’s, not the strange domestic dream I’d wandered into—to think clearly.
“I’m going into town,” I told Asher, who was at the sink scraping something that had once been an omelet out of the pan. “Coffee shop. Maybe a bookstore. I’ll be back by lunch.”
Something moved across his face. Brief. The same flicker I’d seen the night I mentioned Jax Shaw—there and gone, fast enough that I could have imagined it.
“I can drive you.”
“I can drive myself. You have calls.”
“I can reschedule?—”
“Asher.” I touched his arm. “I’m getting coffee. In a town. In daylight. I think I’ll survive.”
He looked at me for a beat too long. Then he nodded and handed me the keys to the Range Rover and told me about a place on Cooper Street with good espresso, and the conversation moved on, and I filed the hesitation the way I’d been filing things for days—carefully, without looking too closely, in the folder I was calling “things that are probably nothing.”
The folder was getting full.
The coffee shopon Cooper Street was small and warm and smelled like roasted beans and baked goods and the particular kind of ambition that fuels mountain towns in the off-season. I ordered a double espresso and a scone and sat at a table by the window and opened my laptop and for twenty minutes I was just Charlie Winters, marine biologist, working on a SEAS progress report and not thinking about anything except dissolved oxygen levels and sampling protocols.
Twenty minutes. That’s how long I got.
“Charlotte.”
