Chapter 3 JACE
JACE
Garrett’s first report comes in. Three pages. Thorough, clean, nothing flagged.
I read it twice and don’t believe a word of it.
The facts are fine. Wren Ashford, twenty-six, sole owner of a flower shop in Brooklyn called Wild Tide Florals.
Opens at eight most mornings, closes by six.
Apartment a few blocks east—walks to and from the shop every day, same route.
Employs one part-time assistant. No recorded incidents, no police reports, no restraining orders.
I close the report and pull up the background file my operations team sent overnight.
Tyler Vaughn. Twenty-nine. Local to Brooklyn.
No criminal record, which means nothing—most men like him don’t have one until they do.
Employment history is patchy. Two jobs in eighteen months, both short-lived.
Financials show a lease in Prospect Heights, less than a mile from her shop.
Less than a mile. That’s not geography. That’s access.
His social media is mostly scrubbed. A few old posts, nothing recent.
That bothers me more than a page full of red flags would.
A man who goes quiet online after a breakup is either moving on or recalibrating.
The scrubbed accounts, the short job stints, the proximity—none of it is proof. All of it is familiar.
I grab my keys and head for Brooklyn.
The drive takes forty minutes. When I get there, I sit in the SUV another minute going over Garrett’s report against what Dawson told me, looking for the gaps. There are always gaps. The things a surveillance team can’t capture because they don’t look like anything from the outside.
Tyler appearing at a restaurant. Outside a coffee shop. Calls from blocked numbers that keep changing. None of it made Garrett’s report because none of it is technically a crime.
I park on the cross street and walk the block once before approaching.
Habit. I want to see the shop the way someone watching it would see it.
Which angles give you a clear line to the interior, where you could stand without drawing attention.
There’s a bench across the street, half screened by a tree.
A coffee shop two doors down with window seats facing her storefront.
If I were running surveillance on this woman, I’d sit right there. Order something. Stay an hour. Nobody would look twice.
I file that and cross the street.
The shop is on a corner where commercial bleeds into residential. Faded green awning, the name in white. Buckets of flowers on the sidewalk, bright and arranged with intention. The front is mostly glass. I can see inside from fifteen feet away.
No security camera. No alarm panel visible. One door, propped open with a metal bucket filled with sunflowers.
I catalog all of that in the time it takes me to reach the entrance.
Then I walk in, and the cataloging stutters. Misfires.
She’s behind the counter with her back half-turned, wrapping something in brown paper.
Hair down—not red anymore. Strawberry blonde, halfway down her back, catching the light from the front windows.
She’s talking to a customer and I can hear her voice before I can make out the words.
She laughs at something and it moves through her whole body. Real.
She’s not the girl I remember.
The girl I remember was a teenager the last time I saw her—at the edge of my peripheral when I was already deep in something else. Eleven years between us. She was a kid. I was already wrecked.
This woman is nothing like that. She moves through her space like she built it with her hands. Her fingers are quick and sure on the stems. There’s a smudge of something green across her forearm and she either hasn’t noticed or doesn’t care.
I notice. And I shouldn’t.
The shop smells like cut stems and cold water and something sweet I can’t place.
It’s small and overstuffed and warm—not the temperature, something else.
Everything in here is alive or about to be.
There’s no clean surface, no empty corner, no dead space.
It’s the opposite of every room I’ve built for myself.
I’m standing in the middle of it and I can’t remember the last time I looked at someone this long without assessing threat.
She finishes with the customer, hands over the bouquet, says something that makes the woman smile on her way out. The door chimes. Then it’s just her and me and the quiet hum of a cooler running somewhere in the back.
She looks up.
For a second, nothing. Her face does what faces do when a stranger walks into their shop—polite, open, ready to help. Professional warmth.
I pull my sunglasses off.
Recognition works its way forward.
“Jace?”
My name in her mouth sounds different than I remember. Not loud and hopeful like it used to when she was a kid. Quieter now. Like I caught her off guard.
“Wren.”
She stares at me, then does this small shake of her head.“What are you—did Dawson send you?”
Quick. She goes straight to Dawson, not small talk, not how-have-you-been. She’s already suspicious.
“Haven’t heard from him in a while. I was in the area.”
She doesn’t believe me. Her chin lifts, just slightly. A practiced defense so small most people would miss it.
“You were in Brooklyn.”
“Yeah.”
Her eyes narrow slightly like she doesn’t buy it.
“You’re a Manhattan person. You’ve always been a Manhattan person.”
She remembers that about me. I don’t know what to do with that, so I file it and move on.
“How are your parents?” I ask, because it’s what a normal person would ask in this situation and I’m trying to pass for one.
“Good. Still in the same brownstone in Park Slope. Both retired now—trying not to drive each other crazy.” She tilts her head. “How about you? Dawson says you basically disappeared after you left the service.”
“I stayed busy.”
She nods and smiles, and for a second neither of us says anything. The shop hums around us and I’m standing three feet from a woman I haven’t seen in over a decade and neither of us knows what to do with that.
“Nice shop,” I say, looking around. I’m not looking at the shop.
I’m looking at the lock on the front door—a basic deadbolt that a credit card could pop.
The windows that make up most of the storefront.
The back hallway that probably leads to a rear entrance I’d need to check.
The fact that she props her only door open with a bucket of flowers like an invitation.
But I’m also aware—and this has nothing to do with the assessment—of how she watches me look. She’s tracking my eyes. Trying to figure out what I’m doing here.
She holds my look longer than she needs to. I hold it right back.
For exactly that long, I forget why I’m here.
Then my phone buzzes in my jacket. Garrett. And I remember.
A man who used to check her phone and grab her arm hard enough to bruise is showing up where she eats, where she drinks her coffee, less than a mile from where she sleeps. I’m here because Dawson can’t be and I told him I’d handle it.
That’s it. That’s all this is.
I start to ask. “How long have you—”
“How long have you been checking up on me?”
She doesn’t let me finish. Sets down the shears and leans against the counter, arms crossed, like she’s been waiting to ask that since I walked in.
“I’m not checking up on you.”
“Jace.” She says my name like a door closing. “My brother called you.”
I don’t answer. She doesn’t need me to.
She shakes her head again. That same small reset. “I appreciate it, but I’m fine. Really. You can tell Dawson I’m fine and save yourself the drive.”
There it is. Fine. Which means nothing is fine.
I don’t tell her I’ll be back. I don’t tell her about Garrett or the report or Tyler’s apartment less than a mile from here.
I don’t tell her that I can see four problems with her security from where I’m standing, or that the door she props open all day is a joke, or that her shop has more glass than wall and anyone on that bench across the street can watch her work for hours.
I don’t tell her that the word “fine” means something different to me than it does to her.
Instead, I look at the bucket nearest the register. Some kind of white flower. “I’ll take those.”
She blinks. Looks at the flowers, looks at me. Something crosses her face that I can’t read, and that bothers me, because I read everyone.
She wraps them without saying anything. When she hands them over, her fingers brush the back of my hand. She pulls back first.
I toss a bill on the counter and don’t wait for change.
I leave with flowers I don’t need and no reason to come back I could justify to anyone.
They sit on the passenger seat the whole drive back to Manhattan.
White. Closed. Not ready yet.