I walk home quickly. I don't run, because running would mean I'm afraid, and I'm already afraid enough without performing it for whoever is watching.
Phoenix is on a call when I come through the door. He reads my face the moment I walk in, and he ends the call in under ten seconds.
"What happened?"
I tell him about the car. The man on the cliff steps. The three days of noticing before I let myself believe it was real. He listens without interrupting, which is something he's been practicing.
When I finish he's quiet for a moment. The kitchen smells like the coffee he made an hour ago going cold in the press, and outside the window the Pacific sits under a flat gray sky, the waves small and rhythmic, completely indifferent. His jaw is tight. His eyes have gone somewhere colder than usual, that particular quality of stillness that is not calm at all but something that has moved past calm into something else.
"Dominic is escalating." He says it quietly. "I need to handle this."
"Handle it how?"
"You don't want to know."
The sentence lands in the kitchen like a stone dropped into water, sending out rings I can feel moving through my chest. I think about the last time secrets accumulated between us, the weight of them, the way they changed the shape of everything until I couldn't recognize what we'd built together. I think about Dominic Webb standing on that sidewalk with his hand on my arm and his dead gray eyes and the recording he has stored somewhere I'll never find.
I cross the kitchen and wrap my hand around Phoenix's arm. He looks down at where I'm touching him and something in his face shifts.
"No more secrets," I say. "Not between us."
He holds my gaze for a long moment. I watch him weigh it, the cost of telling me against the cost of what happens if he doesn't. I watch him decide.
"My father has people." His voice is careful and low. "People who can make Dominic disappear."
The word disappear does a lot of work in that sentence.
"You mean kill him."
He doesn't flinch from it. "If it comes to that."
I let go of his arm. I turn to the window and look at the ocean, at those waves that keep coming regardless of what happens on shore. My stomach has gone strange and hollow. I keep seeing Marcus's face. Not the Marcus from the cabin, not the one with the firelight catching his eyes and his hands closing around my wrists, but the body afterward. The way he looked when it was over. The thing he became when there was nothing left.
More death.
"Is there really no other way?"
Phoenix is quiet for a long moment. He comes to stand beside me at the window and I can feel the heat of him close without him touching me. The two of us staring at the same water.
"If you can think of one," he says, "I'm listening."
I stand there and I actually try, turning the problem over the way I'd turn over a plot problem in my manuscript, looking for the angle I missed, the door that might still be open. Give him money he's already refused. Go to the police with the recording before he can, confess everything and hope the circumstances outweigh the act. Disappear ourselves, leave the country, start over somewhere he can't follow.
Every road ends at the same wall.
Dominic Webb is not a problem with a clean solution. He's a patient man who has thought three moves ahead. He doesn't want money or the police. He wants to hurt us.
I don't say any of this out loud. Phoenix already knows it. That's what the silence is.
That night I can't sleep.
I lie in the dark and listen to Phoenix's breathing beside me, slow and even, and watch the shadows on the ceiling move when headlights pass outside. Every car that slows on the street pulls my attention to the window. Every creak of the house settling feels like a footstep. The night has a different texture now than it did a month ago. It has weight and teeth and things that watch from the edges.
I turn onto my side and look at Phoenix. He's on his back, one arm across his chest, his face in sleep stripped of the controlled expression he keeps on it during the day. He looks younger like this and more like the man who threads his fingers through my hair when he thinks I'm asleep.
I don't know how long I watch him before his eyes open.
He doesn't startle. He just looks at me, trying to read my face.
