Chapter Five
LONDON
THE CABIN KITCHEN WAS the size of a generous closet, which was either charming or a problem depending on the ambition of the project.
I found eggs. I found a cast iron skillet that weighed approximately as much as a small sedan.
I found butter, which I knew was a good sign, and a pepper grinder shaped like a bear, which I felt was a comment on the location.
I had watched omelettes being made. Not made them — watched them.
Bastian’s building had a breakfast concierge who did eggs to order every morning in the lobby, and I had stood approximately four feet from that process no fewer than forty times in the last year.
I had the sequence. Crack, whisk, heat, pour, fold.
The cracking went fine. The whisking went fine. The heat was where things began to develop their own point of view.
Rafe came in from outside — he’d been on the porch since before I woke up, his version of early-morning administration — and stopped in the kitchen doorway with his coffee cup halfway to his mouth.
“It’s almost done,” I said.
He looked at the skillet. He looked at me. He looked back at the skillet.
“Smells good,” he said.
“I know. I used the whole block of butter.”
He set his cup down and leaned against the counter and watched me plate it.
The omelette had its own opinions about folding — it came out less as a fold and more as a kind of geological event, the edges browning in a way I was choosing to call caramelized, the center doing something liquid and optimistic.
I plated it with the conviction of someone who had decided the presentation was intentional and slid it across the table to him.
He sat down. He picked up a fork. He took a bite.
Something moved across his face — controlled, fast, gone before it committed — and he said, “This is good.”
I sat across from him and felt a brief, genuine warmth about this. Then I picked up my own fork.
The outside was on the wrong side of browned. The inside was enthusiastically liquid. What I had made was, technically, buttered eggs in the general vicinity of an omelette shape.
I looked at my fork.
I looked at Rafe.
He was looking directly at the window.
I put the fork down. He found crackers in the cabinet without being asked and set the box between us. I ate four of them and most of a second sleeve and neither of us mentioned the omelette again.
The morning stretched out. I wasn’t used to mornings that stretched.
My schedule at home ran from the moment Bree’s first text came through — usually around seven, always organized, always with a color-coded structure I’d stopped questioning because it worked — until the last event wrapped and I could finally be still.
Here there was no structure, no calendar, no deliverable waiting on the other side of the next hour.
I thought about Bree, who was probably managing a minor professional crisis on my behalf with her usual combination of warmth and tactical ruthlessness.
I thought about the brand partnership call I’d missed.
I thought about the feed, which was now four days dark, which was the longest it had been since I’d started it at twenty-one and figured out I was good at this.
I thought, briefly, about Whitney.
Whitney was fully settled into the life our parents had offered and had looked at it and said yes without reservation — the engagement to Preston Lancaster, the events, the place in the machine.
She was genuinely happy in it. I knew that.
I had spent years trying to find a fault in her happiness and never found one, and the thing I’d eventually understood was that it wasn’t a performance. She actually wanted what she had.
I didn’t resent her for it. I just couldn’t explain myself to someone who had never looked at the available options and wanted a door that wasn’t on the board.
The Wharton application surfaced in my head the way it kept doing — not anxious, just present. A fact sitting there waiting to be made a decision.
I didn’t push it back down.
Rafe came back inside with two fresh mugs of coffee and set one in front of me without asking. I’d stopped being surprised by his particular brand of attention — the way he registered things before they were requests, the way he made the right call and didn’t announce it.
“Tell me something about your life,” I said. “Before all this.”
He sat down across from me and wrapped both hands around his mug. “That’s a broad question.”
“I know. I’m giving you room to maneuver.”
A corner of his mouth moved. He looked at the table for a moment, then back at me. “Before I came out here, I was at an agency in LA. Executive protection, high-end clients. I was good at it.”
“But?”
“But LA wasn’t the right fit anymore.” The same words he’d said in the truck outside Ridgecrest, the door no more open now than it had been then. He wasn’t giving me the full sentence yet. I could see the door. It wasn’t open.
“And building your own operation was?”
“The answer to that.” He paused. “The work I do now — I take the clients I choose. I account for the situation myself. No one else’s read on it, no one else’s call to make.” He turned the mug in his hands. “I got to a point where I needed that. My own operation or nothing.”
I watched him. There was more behind it — I could feel the shape of it without being able to see it — but he wasn’t handing it over and I didn’t push. He’d answered me honestly with what he was ready to give. That was more than most people managed.
“Do you miss it?” I said. “The agency work?”
“Not the agency.” He met my eyes. “Some of the work. The part where the job matters and you can feel it.” A beat. “This job matters.”
I looked at my coffee and thought: nobody had ever said that to me about keeping me safe. They’d talked about the liability. About the optics. About managing the situation.
Rafe stepped outside around eleven — door open, not out of sight, his standard configuration when he wasn’t in the room with me. His phone was on the table.
The screen lit up.
WELLS.
I looked at the door. I looked at the phone. I picked it up before I’d decided to.
“Wells.”
A half-second pause. Then: “London? Oh thank God. Are you okay? I’ve been — okay, I know Rafe said no contact but I had to — are you actually okay?”
“I’m fine. I’m in a cabin in Idaho eating crackers.”
“Crackers.” He exhaled. “Okay. That’s — okay, that’s fine.
The situation is almost clear on our end, by the way.
Dad’s team has the operative fully identified, they’re moving on it today.
” He was talking fast the way he always did when he was relieved and processing at the same time.
“Honestly, I cannot believe Rafe got you out when he did. He told Dad the escalation was already past containment before he walked through your door — like, it was already beyond PR management and into actual threat territory when he took the job. The Harrington people were that far in. If you’d stayed in the building another week—”
He kept talking.
I stopped hearing the words.
Past containment before he walked through your door.
Already beyond PR management.
When he took the job.
“Wells,” I said. “Stop.”
“What? Are you—”
“I’m fine. I’ll call you back.”
I ended the call and put the phone on the table and sat very still.
The door was open. I could hear him on the porch — the sound of him shifting his weight, the creak of a board.
He had known.
Not competing interests in a deal. Not people who want the merger to fail. The full picture — the operative, the escalation, the timeline, all of it — from the moment he’d stood in my doorway with his hand out for my phone and told me we were leaving the city.
He had known and he had not told me.
He came back inside two minutes later. He looked at his phone on the table, and then at me, and he went still.
“Wells called,” I said.
He didn’t ask what Wells had said. He already knew what Wells had said.
“How long?” I said.
“Before I got to your building?”
“How long did you know the full scope of it.”
He didn’t move, didn’t look away. “From the briefing with Warren. Three days before the job started.”
I looked at him. “You stood in my kitchen and told me there were people with competing interests in the deal. You told me I was reachable. That is what you told me.”
“Yes.”
“There was an operative in my building for three months. There had been a breach. You knew all of it and you gave me the merger-sensitivity version and drove me north.”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t give me the choice,” I said. “You made the call for me. About my own life, about my own safety, about what I was allowed to know about a threat that was aimed squarely at me — you made that call and you didn’t tell me.”
“I didn’t tell you,” he said, “because if I had, you would have gone straight at it.”
I opened my mouth.
“You would have confronted it head-on,” he said.
“Called someone. Gone looking for the operative yourself. Found a way to stay in LA and deal with it, because that is how you respond to direct threats. I’d had two days of surveillance data on you before I knocked on your door. I knew exactly how you’d react.”
“You had no right—”
“I know that.”
The acknowledgment landed without apology, without deflection. He knew it and he was saying so and he wasn’t using it to make himself feel better about it.
“It was still my call to make,” I said.
“It was. And I made it instead. That’s the part I can’t take back.”
I stood there and the thing I couldn’t say out loud was sitting right there with us, unavoidable: he’d been right.
Not about the right to do it — that was still mine and he knew it — but about the read.
If he’d handed me the full picture on Day 1, I would have done exactly what he’d described.
I would have gone straight at it. I would have handed them the instrument they needed.