Chapter 4
STAKEOUT
The elevator opens on the fourteenth floor and I almost turn around.
Glass walls. Polished concrete. A reception desk with nobody behind it and a hallway lined with frosted doors, each one etched with a suite number and nothing else.
The building is one of those downtown towers where every floor costs more than my first car and the tenants don’t need signage because their clients already know where to find them.
Darcy gave me the suite number three days ago. He’s the best, she said. Ex-law enforcement, now private. Discreet. Expensive. Not the kind of guy who advertises on bus benches. She texted me his name and a phone number and then called me forty-five minutes later to make sure I’d saved both.
I haven’t called the number. I’m here instead, because calling felt like something I could talk myself out of on the drive over, and showing up doesn’t give me that option.
Suite 1412. The door is cracked open. I push through it and the office on the other side is clean—not empty-clean, controlled-clean.
Desk, laptop, two chairs, a window that looks out over the river.
No filing cabinets. No framed PI license on the wall.
A single photograph pinned under a glass paperweight on the desk—a German shepherd, not a person.
The man behind the desk doesn’t stand. He’s leaning back with a coffee in one hand and his phone in the other, and when he looks up at me his eyes do a single pass—fast, thorough, done—and I feel like I’ve already been read.
Dark hair. Dark eyes. A scar cutting through one eyebrow. Jaw that could open mail.
“Mrs. Cole?”
“Claire.”
“Nolan.” He sets the phone down and nods at the chair across from him. “Darcy said you’d be reaching out. She didn’t say when.”
“I needed a few days.”
“To decide.”
“To stop hoping I wouldn’t need to.”
His mouth does something—not a smile, not sympathy. Acknowledgment. He’s heard that before. He’s sat across from women who walked through that door carrying the same weight and said some version of the same thing, and he didn’t waste their time with comfort then either.
“Tell me what you’ve got.”
I pull the flash drive from my bag. Small, black, unremarkable. I set it on the desk between us and I’m already talking because if I stop to think about what I’m doing—hiring a private investigator to surveil my husband—the words will lock up in my throat.
“My sister pulled this from my husband’s laptop.
Emails, text messages, photos. He’s having an affair.
At least eighteen months. A woman named Megan—I don’t know her last name yet.
Hotels on campaign travel days. The texts go from professional to explicit and the timeline is—” I swallow. “It’s long. It’s not a fling.”
Nolan picks up the flash drive. Turns it once between his fingers. Sets it beside the laptop. “What else?”
“She’s pregnant. Megan. He—in the texts, she tells him and he sends celebration emojis.
This is everything I’ve wanted.” My nails are digging into my palms. I let them.
“And there’s something about the lube we use when—he’s been using a spermicidal brand without telling me.
To make sure I don’t get pregnant. While his girlfriend is carrying his baby. ”
Nolan’s coffee cup stops halfway to his mouth. He sets it down.
“There’s one more thing.” My voice does something I don’t give it permission to do—it drops, goes thick, and my jaw is clenching so hard my molars ache. “On the drive you’ll find a text thread about a necklace. My husband had a necklace made for me after I had a miscarriage.”
The office is very quiet.
“A jeweler made it. Custom. The birthstone for the month our baby was supposed to be born. Bennett put it around my neck and held me and said so we never forget.” My thumb presses into the crease of my palm hard enough to make the knuckle pop.
“I wore it for two years. Then I put it away. And my husband took it out of my jewelry box, put it in a prettier box, and gave it to his mistress.”
Nolan’s hand is flat on the desk. His fingers have gone rigid—not a fist, just tension, the tendons standing up across the back of his hand. His eyes haven’t left mine and something behind them has changed. Shifted. Gone darker.
“I saw her wearing it. At a campaign rally. Before I knew about any of the rest—the affair, the texts, any of it. I saw my necklace on a stranger’s throat and that’s how I found out my husband is cheating on me. With a pendant he had made for our dead child.”
He doesn’t say anything for a long time. His jaw moves. The scar through his eyebrow pulls.
Then: “What do you need from me?”
“Surveillance. Photos, dates, times. Documentation that holds up.” I straighten in the chair and my voice comes back—harder now, the crack sealed over.
“And I need you to understand something. My husband is a state representative running for a congressional seat. If there is any chance I’m wrong about this—any chance that what’s on that drive has been taken out of context, any scenario where this isn’t what it looks like—I cannot be the reason his campaign falls apart. I can’t do that to him.”
The words burn coming out. I’m sitting across from a man I just told about the spermicidal lube and the stolen necklace and the celebration emojis, and I’m asking him to be careful with Bennett’s career.
The instinct to protect is so deep it’s practically structural.
Fifteen years of don’t embarrass him, don’t contradict him, don’t be the reason something goes wrong.
My marriage is a smoking ruin and I’m still standing guard over the ashes.
Nolan watches me. That single-pass look again, except slower. He picks up the flash drive and plugs it into his laptop.
“You’re not wrong.”
“You haven’t read it yet.”
“I’ve been doing this for twelve years.” The screen glows.
His eyes move across the first page of texts.
His jaw tightens—then tightens again, harder, when he scrolls down.
Whatever he’s reading is doing something to his composure that twelve years of experience can’t fully smooth over. “Surveillance starts tonight.”
I stand. My legs feel like they belong to someone else. “Thank you.”
He looks up from the screen. For maybe half a second, the professional filter drops and I see his face without it—not pity, not business. Something hotter. Rawer. Then it’s gone and he’s reaching for his coffee and the moment closes like a door.
I walk out. Down the hallway, into the elevator, through the marble lobby. The sunlight hits me when I step outside and I stand on the sidewalk for ten seconds with my eyes closed and my hands shaking.
“Why are you picking this fight again, Claire? I’ve had a long day. I’ve told you I can’t deal with you when you’re like this. Don’t wait up.”
The front door slams. His car starts. Gone.
I pull out my phone. The tracking app. Bennett’s blue dot moves east, and I already know where it’s going. Same address. Same house.
I grab my keys.
The knock on my window comes twenty minutes later, and I bite the inside of my cheek so hard I taste blood.
I’m parked three houses down, engine off, headlights off, Bennett’s car already in the driveway. Nolan is standing on my driver’s side in a black jacket with the camera at his hip, and the look on his face says I am a problem he did not budget for tonight.
I roll the window down.
“Your car is in your husband’s name. If anyone on this street runs the plates—”
“I know.”
“Go home, Claire.”
“Not happening.”
He stares at me. I stare back. A dog barks somewhere down the block. Then he glances up the street and jerks his chin toward the far end—a black SUV parked beneath the oaks, so dark it looks like a shadow.
“Move your car. Around the corner on Hillcrest. Walk back. Passenger side. Don’t slam the door.”
A minute later I’m pulling the SUV door shut behind me, soft as I can. The cabin is dark. Coffee cups in the center console, a camera with a long lens, two small monitors mounted low and angled away from the windows. The glow from the screens is the only light.
He’s closer than I expected. The SUV isn’t small, but the console between us isn’t wide, and when he shifts to check one of the monitors his forearm brushes the armrest an inch from mine.
He smells like coffee and something clean underneath it.
Not cologne—just soap, maybe. The kind of man who doesn’t try to smell like anything and ends up smelling better than the men who do.
“Darcy already texted me twice tonight asking if you’d done anything stupid.” He doesn’t look at me. He’s watching the house. “I told her no.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m a liar.”
Through the windshield, the house glows. I can see shapes through the sheer curtains—two figures moving in the kitchen. One opens the refrigerator. The other crosses the room. They’re close to each other. Comfortable.
My stomach turns over.
“How long have you been out here?”
“Since eight.” He adjusts something on the camera lens without taking his eyes off the house. “He pulled in at nine-fifteen. She met him at the door.”
“Met him how?”
He glances at me. Deciding what I can handle.
“Like she was expecting him.”
I nod. My jaw is tight enough that my teeth ache. Through the curtains, one of the shadows hands something to the other. A glass, maybe. They’re standing close. Then they move out of the kitchen and the living room light comes on and the shadows get harder to read.
“Can you get what you need from here? Through the windows?”
“Maybe. Depends on whether they stay by the windows and how much the curtains block.” He settles back in his seat. “It’s not ideal. What I really need is them somewhere without a wall between us. A doorway, a porch, a yard.”
“And if they don’t come outside?”
“Then I come back tomorrow night. And the night after that.” He lifts his coffee cup, finds it empty, puts it back. “Stakeouts aren’t exciting. It’s mostly sitting.”
“How long does it usually take?”