The phone sits on the bedside table. No text.
I could call Del. She'd answer in one ring, the way she always does. But the thing she'd actually want to say — you got attached, you knew better, this is what happens — I can't hear that right now.
I sit on the top stair. The wood is smooth under my palms, worn by a century of feet. Margit climbed these stairs every day for decades. She stayed when the notes came. She stayed when the offers came. She stayed until she couldn't anymore.
From here I can see the front door. The deadbolt Liam installed on Day Three — the one he measured twice, tested three times, then tested again at two in the morning because the throw felt a quarter inch short. The man secures a door the way other people say I love you. Thoroughly. Without being asked.
My thumbnail taps my teeth. The rhythm is fast. Unsteady.
He said he'd text. Twenty minutes after they're done.
People say things. My ex said you're the best thing in my life three days before he moved out. Saying you'll come back is easy. Coming back is the part that requires you to choose someone over the version of your life that doesn't include them.
The light shifts. Thin morning turns into something brighter, more committed. The shadow from the banister moves across the wall in increments I could track if I cared. I don't. I sit on the stair with my knees pulled up and his henley stretched over them and I wait.
The waiting is the hardest thing I've ever done.
Harder than the first note. Harder than the gravestone photograph. Harder than the word carved into my wall in block letters by a man who thought patience was a weapon. Those were threats I could respond to — with stubbornness, with defiance, with the particular fury that comes from being told you don't belong somewhere you've chosen.
This is just absence. Just time. Just a house that won't talk to me and a man I can't reach.
I rest my head against the banister post. Close my eyes. Picture what's happening twenty minutes away — Reese's steady voice laying out the evidence, Liam by the door with his jaw tight, Novak realizing that the careful patience of his campaign just collapsed under the weight of cell tower pings and locksmith receipts. The man who walked through my house in the dark is sitting across from two operatives who know exactly what he did.
Good. I hope he's terrified. I hope his hands shake the way mine shook when I found the bird.
The phone buzzes.
I grab it so fast my elbow cracks against the banister.
Done. Coming back. 20 min.
Three sentences. No detail. No warmth. The text of a man filing a report, not a man coming home.
I type: Okay.
Set the phone down. Press the heels of my hands against my eyes.
The front door opens.
I'm in the kitchen by then — standing, because sitting felt too much like surrender. The coffee is made. Two mugs on the counter. Muscle memory. Routine. The small domestic choreography of a woman who doesn't know what else to do with her hands.
His footsteps cross the foyer. The floorboard near the parlor archway groans. He comes around the corner into the kitchen, and I see it immediately — the way he stands in the doorframe like the frame is holding him together.
"It's done," he says.
The words should feel like relief. Novak — identified, confronted, evidence handed to people with badges and jurisdiction. The threat that carved my name into my wall, that put a dead woman's gravestone on my pillow. Over.
Liam doesn't move from the doorway. His hands are at his sides — not in his pockets, not crossed, not reaching for me. Just hanging there, like he's forgotten what to do with them.
"Novak folded inside of forty minutes." Flat. Clinical. "Tried to frame it as overzealous acquisition strategy. The detective is pulling the warrant. Evie's coordinating the handoff — the NDAs won't hold once criminal charges are filed."
He's giving me the briefing. The clean, professional summary. The operative wrapping up the operation. Every sentence is a brick in a wall I can feel him building between us in real time.
"And Vance?"
His jaw works. "Case closed. Assignment complete."
There it is.
