“They’re with me. I’ve had them for two weeks. I’ve been waiting.” A pause. “Waiting to be sure I was brave enough to do this.” She breathed in and then exhaled slowly. “Then he had to go on this trip, and I thought, Imogen, it’s now or never. Once we have this baby, he’ll never let me leave.”
Wolfe leaned forward and wrote something on the notepad on his desk and turned it toward me.Where is she?
“Imogen, where are you right now? Are you in Houston?”
“Yes. The house.” She gave the address without being asked, which told me something about how thoroughly she’d decided.
Wolfe scribbled something else, and I read it and gave him a nod.
“We can come get you,” I said. “We can have people there tonight if you want.”
“I need to be gone before he gets back,” she said. “He comes back Thursday. I have until then.”
“Even better. That gives us time to make a plan,” I said, looking at the note Wolfe was writing furiously. “What about guards? Are they going to be a problem?”
“Anton took his security with him, but there’s always at least one guard on the property, sometimes two. They patrol the property.”
Wolfe gave me a nod.
“Imogen, we’re going to help you. You made the right call.” I tried to sound reassuring and confident.
A long silence. When she spoke again, her voice was thinner, the control slipping just slightly. “You said on the stage that survivable becomes livable. That’s what I kept thinking about.” She paused again. “I want that. For me. For the baby.”
“You’re going to have it,” I said. “I promise.”
I looked at Jackson. He was watching me with an expression I recognized. It was the same one he’d had in that corridor outside the ballroom when he told me he was proud of me.
Wolfe shoved another note my direction, and I read it real quick.
“We’ll get a plan together,” I said. “I’ll call you back to make arrangements. If for any reason you can’t talk, just pretend it’s someone asking for someone else and say there’s no one there by that name and hang up, okay?”
“Okay.”
“You’re going to be okay.”
She said thank you, very quietly, and the line went dead.
I set the phone down.
The three of us were quiet for a moment.
Then Wolfe straightened. “I’ll call Chance.” He looked at Jackson. “Get Hawk and Gator up here.”
“You believe her?” Jackson asked him.
Wolfe looked at the notepad with the address on it. “I believe she’s frightened,” he said. “I believe she’s pregnant. And I believe that a woman with documents she’s been collecting on her husband has made a decision.” He looked at me. “You?”
I thought about the corridor and the card disappearing into the small clutch.
“She’s ready to leave,” I said. “I knew it at the Gala, and I know it now.”
Wolfe held my gaze for a moment. Then he nodded, the single, definitive nod that meant a decision had been made, and picked up his phone.
Jackson came to stand beside me.
“You did that,” he said quietly. “At the Gala. That was you.”
I looked at Wolfe already talking to Chance in the clipped efficient shorthand of two people who’d done this before. I thought about a sad woman in a blue gown who’d finally decided to save herself.
