But the case is closed. The threat is neutralized. The client is safe.
Which means I have no reason to stay at the Foxglove.
No operational justification for sleeping in a bed with a yellow bedspread. No professional mandate for the way her hand rests over my heart at three a.m. No protocol that coverswhat happens when the assignment ends and the man who took it can't leave.
I get in the car. Pull away from the curb. The duplex shrinks in the rearview — ordinary, forgettable, already fading into the landscape of a street that never knew what lived there.
I drive toward Sycamore Lane.
Twenty minutes. She said okay. She's waiting in a kitchen that smells like coffee and old wood, in a house I was sent to protect. A door I installed the deadbolt on. A cellar I finally secured. A garden gnome in the front yard whose chipped grin looks different to me now. Less unsettling. More like recognition.
The case is closed.
Something else isn't.
Chapter 15
Kari
The front door closes and the house inhales.
Not a sound. A sensation — the way a room changes when something vital leaves it. The floorboard near the parlor archway groans once, settling back into itself, and then the Foxglove goes quiet in a way I have never heard it go quiet before.
I stand at the kitchen window. Watch the black SUV pull away from the curb — HPG's vehicle, the one they call Saint, because of course private security names their cars like warships. Liam in the passenger seat, his profile sharp against the morning light. Saint turns at the end of Sycamore Lane. Gone.
Be careful. That's what I said. Two words, aimed at one man, in front of a professional who probably cataloged the entire exchange in the time it took me to tap my thumbnail against my teeth.
Twenty minutes after we're done. I'll text.
I should be relieved. The man who carved my name into my wall, who left a photograph of my dead aunt's gravestone on my pillow, who walked through this house while I slept — they're going to end it. Today. Right now. Reese and Liam and a file fullof evidence that Evie built overnight. By the time the coffee in my mug goes cold, the threat that has lived inside my walls for weeks will have a face and a set of charges.
So why does my chest feel like someone is standing on it?
Because after is a word I haven't let myself think about. After the threat. After the assignment. After the professional reason for Liam Cade to sleep on the right side of my bed and bring banana bread to my neighbors and tell me about gas station magnets like he was handing me pieces of himself he'd never given anyone.
After means no reason to stay.
My thumbnail finds my teeth. The bathroom mirror upstairs reflects a woman who is very good at finding things to fix and very bad at believing anyone will stick around once the fixing is done.
I don't go look.
The Foxglove is too quiet.
I know this house. I know its sounds the way you know the breathing of someone sleeping beside you — the radiator that ticks in the parlor, the third stair that groans no matter where you step, the particular creak of the kitchen floorboard near the pantry that means the subfloor needs attention. The house is never silent. It talks constantly, the low muttering monologue of a structure that has opinions about everything.
But right now, it's holding its breath.
I try to keep busy. That's what I do — that's what I've always done.
Gerald is in the upstairs closet. The drill's weight is familiar in my hand — solid, dependable, the kind of object that doesexactly what you ask and never pretends it was going to leave and then doesn't.
"Good morning, Gerald."
Gerald doesn't answer. Neither does the house.
I find something to fix. There's always something to fix in the Foxglove — loose baseboard trim in the second-floor hallway, a hinge on the linen closet that's been squeaking since I arrived. I kneel on the hardwood, position the screw, squeeze the trigger. Gerald whirs. The sound fills the hallway like a small mechanical heartbeat.
But I can't sustain it. I tighten the hinge. I check the baseboard. I run out of things within reach that need fixing, and the silence rushes back in like water filling a hole I dug in sand.
