“Bedroom’s yours,” Ronan said, locking the front door and checking the deadbolt. “I’ll take the couch.”
“Ronan, you don’t have to?—”
“The bedroom.” Firm. Certain. He moved to the window and adjusted the blinds, angling them so the slats overlapped. “Leave the door open. So I can hear if anything happens.”
She stood in the hallway and watched him check every window in the cottage. Methodical. Practiced. The locks. The latches on the screens. The small strip of tape he pressed across the bottom of the front door—she’d seen him do it before without understanding why. Now she did.
“Do you do that every night?”
“Every night.”
“Has anyone ever tried to get in?”
“No.” He straightened from the door. “But the point of checking isn’t finding something wrong. It’s knowing that you looked.”
She didn’t have an answer for that. She carried her bag to the bedroom and set it on the chair in the corner. The bed was made—tightly, the corners crisp, the pillow centered. Military habit. The room smelled like laundry soap and the clean, warm scent of his skin.
She changed into the sleep clothes she’d packed—an old t-shirt and shorts—and stood in the bedroom doorway. He was on the couch, his shoes still on, his phone on the coffee table beside him. The lamp in the corner threw a low circle of light across the room.
“Thank you,” she said.
He looked up. “For what?”
“For being the person my father needed and didn’t have.”
Something moved behind his eyes. Pain, maybe. Or recognition.
“Get some sleep, Lila.”
She lay in the dark in a bed that smelled like him and listened to him settle on the couch, the old springs creaking under his weight. She heard him check his phone. Heard him set it on the coffee table. Heard his breathing even out—slow and controlled, the breathing of a man who had trained himself to stay alert even while resting.
She didn’t sleep for a long time. But she felt safe. And that was something she hadn’t felt in five years.
The smell of coffee woke her.
For a disoriented moment, she didn’t know where she was. The ceiling was wrong—lower than her bedroom, no fan. The light was different, coming from the wrong direction. Then the previous night reassembled itself in pieces: the lamp, the study door, the drive to his cottage, and Ronan’s voice saying the bedroom, like it was a military order.
She sat up and found her phone on the nightstand. 6:47 a.m.
Through the open bedroom door, she could hear Ronan moving in the kitchen. Cabinet opening. Spoon against ceramic. The small domestic sounds of a man who’d been awake for a while.
She reached for the phone to check her messages and stopped.
A text from a number she didn’t recognize. Sent at 6:32.
Check your office. Now.
Her stomach dropped. She stared at the screen. The number wasn’t Ronan’s disposable phone—she’d memorized that one. This was something else.
She typed back.
Who is this?
No response.
She threw back the covers and grabbed yesterday’s clothes from her overnight bag. Jeans, the blouse she’d worn to work, and sneakers instead of heels. If something was wrong, she didn’t want to be tripping over her own feet.
Ronan was at the counter when she came out of the bedroom. Two mugs of coffee sat beside the machine, steam curling in the early light. He’d changed his shirt. His hair was damp. He looked like a man who’d been up since five.
