CHAPTER NINE
Nora
Morning was usually when I could think clearly, but today my thoughts were all over the place. Every time I thought I’d finally stopped thinking about what happened the night before, another memory popped into my head.
By the time I got out of bed, I knew it was pointless to try to make sense of everything.
I wasn’t going to find the answers to what to do next by lying in bed or staring at the ceiling.
I got dressed slowly, brushed my hair into a ponytail, and looked at myself in the mirror.
The woman in the reflection looked calmer than I had in days.
I knew that calmness could disappear quickly. Fear had been a part of my life for years, and I didn’t think it would ever really go away. But I felt like something inside me had changed. I hadn’t woken up that morning feeling like I had to fight everyone around me.
That didn’t mean I trusted Liam completely, and it didn’t mean I understood what was going on between us. At least I wasn’t feeling the crushing loneliness that I’d felt since I arrived in Boston.
The house was already busy by the time I got downstairs. I heard quiet voices coming through the open doors. Someone was walking down the hallway with a tray of glasses. One of the security guards nodded at me as he went outside to do his patrol.
The house had become comforting over the last few days. It wasn’t home, but it was the closest thing to safety I’d known in a long time.
As I walked into the dining room, one of the women who worked in the house came in with the mail. She sorted through the envelopes, then handed one of them to me with a smile.
I thanked her, took the envelope, and waited until she left before I looked at it properly.
My name was written on the front in ink.
That was it. There was no company logo, no return address, and no sender’s name.
I turned it over. The back was just as plain as the front.
I felt an uneasiness in my stomach because the longer I looked at it, the more impossible it seemed.
Nobody outside the house was supposed to know where I was. That was the point of bringing me here.
I stood there for a moment, trying to think of an explanation.
Maybe Liam had arranged for something to be delivered and forgotten to tell me.
Maybe someone from the café had tracked me down.
I tried to think of positive explanations, but none of them made sense.
Before I lost my nerve, I opened the envelope and pulled out the piece of paper inside.
There were only three lines written on the page, but they were enough to make me feel cold all over.
You thought you could disappear. You stole from our people. We’re coming for what’s ours.
I read the words again, hoping they’d change if I looked at them long enough.
They didn’t. My hands started shaking. I had to grip the edge of the table to steady myself, and even that wasn’t enough.
The letter slipped out of my hands and fell to the floor.
The room suddenly felt smaller. The air was too heavy.
Memories that I’d forced into the back of my mind came rushing back.
Every mile I’d traveled, every lie I’d told myself about being safe, and every attempt to believe that my past could never catch up with me collapsed in an instant.
The only explanation that made sense was that the life I’d been running from had finally caught up with me. The letter was from the people I’d been trying to escape…my stepfather’s connections, the people I’d stolen from. They knew where I was, and they were coming for me.
The sound of Liam’s footsteps reached me while I was still staring at the letter on the floor.
I didn’t have to look up to know who it was because there was something about the way he moved through the house that I instantly recognized.
He was as calm as always, unhurried and certain.
Under any other circumstances, hearing Liam would have made me feel better, but the letter had already taken me back to the past. I was too upset to feel calm now.
Liam stopped a foot away from me without saying a word. I could feel his eyes on me, moving from my face to the sheet of paper lying beside my feet. By the time I found the courage to look at him, he’d already bent to pick it up.
My first instinct was to stop him, because I knew what those words would do to him once he read them, but I was too shocked to move.
He read every line slowly, then lowered the letter with his eyes on me. The warmth I’d seen in him the previous day was gone, and it felt like a different man had walked into the room. There was a hardness in his eyes that reminded me why people spoke about Liam O’Connor in hushed tones.
Liam held the letter between his fingers for another moment before speaking. When he finally did, his voice was quiet, but there was an edge beneath the calm that made every word feel like a blow.
“Nora, I need you to tell me exactly who sent this letter, what they’re talking about, and why they believe you took something that belongs to them.
Somebody got a threat into this house even though it’s been carefully hidden.
I don’t have time for half-truths or guesses, so whatever you’ve been carrying on your own ends now. ”
I heard his words, but all I could think about were the three lines on that piece of paper and the years I’d spent convincing myself I’d escaped the people who wrote them.
My heart was beating so hard that I could hear it, and every question Liam asked seemed to pull me further away instead of bringing me back to the present.
Liam waited a few seconds before speaking again, his voice firmer this time, carrying the authority of a man who’d spent his entire life giving orders that people obeyed without argument.
“Answer me, Nora. I need names. I need to know who these people are, how they found you, and what they’re expecting to get from you. Since they’ve reached this house once, they’ll try again, and I won’t be able to stop them if you leave me in the dark.”
I wanted to answer Liam. I wanted to tell him everything because I knew he wasn’t asking out of curiosity.
He was trying to understand the danger standing in front of us, the danger that he’d to protect me from.
The problem was that every question dragged another memory to the surface, and those memories buried every word I tried to say.
My stepfather’s voice, my mother’s silence, and the nights I spent wondering whether I would survive until morning all came back to me.
The stolen money and the bus heading to Boston…
it all came back. Liam took another step toward me, his eyes never leaving my face, as though he could see the panic growing inside me, the panic I couldn’t hide.
“Nora,” he said, his voice noticeably harder now, the voice of a man who wouldn’t give up. “Whatever happened before you came here won’t stay in the past if it follows you to his house. Stop trying to protect whoever you’re protecting and tell me the truth.”
Something inside me gave way, and I felt like I was falling apart.
I crossed the distance between us so quickly that I barely realized I’d moved, snatched the letter from Liam’s hand, and crushed it against my chest before taking several hurried steps away from him.
I kept shaking my head, because saying no felt easier than trying to explain a story I’d spent years refusing to tell anyone but my closest friends.
When I felt the tears running down my face, I knew I’d already lost whatever control I’d thought I still had in front of Liam.
Without waiting to see whether Liam followed me, I hurried out of the dining room.
I heard him call my name behind me. I couldn’t stop because stopping meant answering him, and that meant opening a door I’d promised myself would never be opened again.
I climbed the stairs quickly and locked my bedroom door behind me with shaking hands before sliding down onto the floor, the letter still clutched tightly against my chest.
When Liam reached the other side of the door a few seconds later, I stayed exactly where I was, too frightened to move or speak, too frightened to face him. I stayed where I was for a long time after he walked away.
For so long I’d lived my life hoping that if I was quiet and worked hard, the past would just forget about me.
I’d made a life for myself around that hope.
It wasn’t a perfect life, but it was mine.
I’d found an apartment and gotten two jobs that paid enough for me to pay my bills.
People knew me as Nora, the waitress who didn’t talk much about herself.
My life wasn’t exciting, but it was peaceful, and after everything I’d been through, peace was all I needed.
The letter changed all of that. I opened it again, even though I already knew what it said. I read the three lines over and over until my eyes got blurry. Then I started thinking about things I didn’t want to think about.
I used to tell myself that my life changed when I took the bus to Boston.
That wasn’t true. My life changed when my mother remarried.
At first Victor was nice. He smiled when people were around and spoke kindly.
He even bought us presents. I wanted to believe he was a good person because I was young and thought that adults were always who they seemed to be.