“What happened?” she asks.
I interlace our fingers. The ring catches the morning light.
“We have a lead on Dmitri,” I tell her.
Her grip tightens.
“We’re going to find them,” I say. And I mean it.
She nods. Her eyes are bright with hope.
“Then let’s go home,” she says. “And get to work.”
I study her — this woman who entered my house carrying a five-hundred-thousand-dollar debt and was wearing Hello Kitty pajamas when we first met — and I think,I don’t deserve her.
And then,I’m going to spend the rest of my life ensuring she never has reason to agree.
BONUS EPILOGUE
MAREN
The hospital reeks of antiseptic and other people’s worst days.
Six years into this career and I have never fully acclimated to it, which my attending told me during residency was a promising sign. Apparently, the day you cease noticing is the day you’ve stopped caring.
I push through the exit doors into the parking lot, and the night air hits my face like a slap I didn’t know I needed.
Different out here. It smells of rain and freedom. The relief of being outside.
The shift was rough. Not the roughest I’ve had — I keep a private ranking, and tonight doesn’t crack the top ten. But there was a delivery that turned into an emergency that turned into four hours in a room where every decision was life or death, and now I’m standing in a vacant parking lot past midnight with my feet throbbing inside my shoes and my brain operating at approximately twenty percent capacity.
And underneath all of it, humming at a frequency that’s been running nonstop for weeks, is Landon Webb.
He showed up outside the hospital twelve days ago. I recognized him from the handful of times I’d seen him with Ellie —the pleasant face, the expensive jacket, that easy smile he wears like a costume. He asked where she was. Framed it as concern, which almost made me laugh.I just want to make sure she’s okay, Maren. I care about her. As though years of friendship hadn’t furnished me with enough material to compose a deeply unflattering biography of the man.
So, I told him what I’d practiced: that I hadn’t seen Ellie in person for months. That we texted occasionally and she seemed fine. The truth, carefully measured and precisely served. Then I walked to my car and sat behind the wheel for ten minutes before my hands agreed to stop shaking.
It was a gamble. Confronting a man like Landon directly, handing him information, even carefully managed — I knew what I was doing. But it seems to have worked, because the crawling awareness of being watched that had been following me around for days faded over the next week.
Until tonight.
I’m halfway across the parking lot when the sensation arrives, sudden and absolute. The hair on the back of my neck stands up, and my nervous system decides something is very wrong and that it would very much like to be taken seriously.
I keep walking. I don’t glance around.
But my body knows. Whatever part of me that still remembers what it was to be prey on an open plain, it’s awake now, and it’s paying attention.
“Maren.”
I spin, pulse spiking. But it’s just Greg.
He’s jogging slightly to close the distance, breath fogging in the December air. He works the obstetrics ward with me three shifts a week, asked me to dinner six weeks ago, and still hasn’t fully processed the wordno.
“Didn’t see you leave,” he says, falling into step beside me.
Of course you didn’t. I walked right past you while you were glued to your phone.
“I slipped out quietly,” I say instead.
