Chapter 5
Chapter
Five
DOMINIC
Leah calls at six in the morning while Harper is still asleep against my chest.
I extract myself without waking her, which takes the kind of controlled movement I usually reserve for high-threat situations, and take the phone into the bathroom.
"We traced the text. Burner phone, purchased cash at a convenience store in Grand Junction. That's three hours from Summit Falls."
My jaw tightens. "Three hours."
"Carlos is pulling security footage from the store. We should have a face by end of day." Leah pauses. "How is she?"
"Better." True. These last ten days, Harper has been sleeping through the night, eating full meals, laughing at Betty Russo's commentary on the town's romantic entanglements.
She sang in the shower yesterday. Low, absent, a melody I didn't recognize.
The first time I've heard her sing since she arrived.
"I need to talk to her about Brianna."
"What about Brianna?"
"We ran a deeper background. She lied on her application. The address she listed doesn't exist. The references were fabricated. Whoever Brianna Morrison is, she's not who she told us she was."
I lean against the bathroom counter. "How deep have you gone?"
"Deep enough to know that Brianna Morrison applied for five positions in Harper's orbit over the course of a year before getting hired as her assistant. She applied to the label, the management company, the touring crew, and the merchandising team before landing the assistant role."
"That's not a job search. That's targeting."
"Carlos is working with the FBI on it. But Dominic, this means someone with daily access to Harper's schedule, her contacts, her home, her devices, has been embedded for six months. Every location, every routine, every delivery. All of it accessible."
I close my eyes. "Does Harper know?"
"Not yet. I wanted to call you first because you're the one standing next to her, and I need to know she's going to be okay when I tell her."
"Tell her today. She deserves to know."
"I will. Two o'clock your time. Make sure she eats first."
Leah hangs up. I set the phone on the counter and stare at my reflection in the mirror above the sink. The man looking back at me has been awake for ninety seconds and is already running threat assessments.
Harper is in the other room, sleeping in the indent my body left in the mattress, her hair across the pillow and her face soft in a way she never allows when she's conscious.
I've been inside her. I've held her while she slept. I've learned that she hums when she's content and goes quiet when she's afraid and kisses like someone who's been saving up for years.
And in eight hours I'm going to watch her find out that the person she trusted with her daily life was planted there by someone who wants to destroy her.
I make coffee. Leave a cup on her nightstand. Go downstairs to check the perimeter.
Summit Falls in August smells like pine and warm dust. Main Street is empty at six fifteen except for Betty's light coming on in the diner kitchen and a truck I recognize as Eli Blackwood's heading toward the ranch.
The mountains are lit gold at their peaks where the sunrise hasn't reached the valley yet.
I check the inn's back entrance. The window June had Carl fix. The parking lot. Harper's rental, untouched. No unfamiliar vehicles on Main Street. No one sitting in parked cars.
Clear. For now.
My uncle finds me on his porch an hour later.
"You look like you haven't slept."
"I slept."
He hands me a mug. His coffee is still weak, but the gesture is what matters. He sits in the other chair and watches the street the way I do, except he's looking for patients and I'm looking for threats.
"Michael, if I asked you a hypothetical question about professional boundaries, would you give me a straight answer?"
"I'm a small-town doctor, Dominic. Straight answers are all I've got."
"If a patient started as a professional obligation and became personal, at what point does the professional judgment become compromised?"
He looks at me over his coffee. "Is this about the woman at the inn?"
"Hypothetically."
"Hypothetically, judgment gets compromised the moment you start making decisions based on what you want instead of what's right." He takes a sip. "But also hypothetically, sometimes what you want and what's right are the same thing, and the only person standing in the way is you."
I finish my coffee and go back to the inn.
Harper is awake. Sitting cross-legged on the bed in my shirt, which she's stolen and shows no intention of returning. She's writing in her notebook, and when I come in, she looks up with a smile so unguarded it makes my chest tight.
"Hey."
"Hey." I sit on the edge of the bed. "Leah's calling at two."
Her smile dims. "News?"
"Progress. She'll fill you in."
She studies my face. Harper reads people the way I do, just from the opposite direction. I assess threats. She assesses intentions. And right now she's reading something in my expression I didn't mean to put there.
"What aren't you telling me?"
"It's Leah's call to make."
"But you know."
"I know some of it."
She closes the notebook. "Is it bad?"
"It's complicated. Eat breakfast first."
"That bad."
I take her hand. "You're safe. That part hasn't changed and won't change."
She laces her fingers through mine and squeezes, and I hold on because in approximately six hours the ground beneath her is going to shift, and I need her to know that not everything is unstable.
We eat breakfast at Betty's. Harper orders eggs and toast and juice, and Betty gives me an approving nod like I've accomplished something by getting this woman to eat three meals a day.
Sophie Blackwood stops by with Charlotte and invites Harper to a gallery opening next week, and Harper says yes without hesitation, like she's someone who lives here and plans ahead.
That's the moment the doubt settles in.
She doesn't live here. She lives in LA in a house with security cameras and a gate and a life that generates revenue streams and tabloid coverage and the kind of attention that follows you into grocery stores and bathrooms and the beds of people who get too close.
I'm a private security consultant with a studio apartment in DC, a mother who thinks I work too much, and a life designed around being invisible.
I protect people. I don't keep them. I don't build something with them.
I stand at their door until the threat passes, and then I move on to the next one.
Harper catches me looking at her while she talks to Sophie about the gallery. She raises an eyebrow. I look away.
At two o'clock, Leah calls.
I'm sitting in the chair by the window while Harper takes the call on the bed. I can hear Leah's voice through the phone, steady and professional, laying out the facts about Brianna with the clinical precision of someone who delivers bad news for a living.
Harper's face doesn't crumble. It empties. That's worse.
She asks questions. Good ones. The same ones I would ask. How long has Brianna had access to my home security codes? Who else has she communicated with? Has the FBI made contact?
When the call ends, she sets the phone on the nightstand and sits very still.
"She was in my house," Harper says. "She had the code to my front door. She scheduled my appointments. She knew what I ate, what I wore, when I slept. For six months she was standing next to me, and I didn't see it."
"Nobody did. That's how embedded assets work."
"Don't do that. Don't make it clinical. This isn't an asset. This is a person I trusted who was feeding information to someone who wants to hurt me." Her voice cracks on the last word, and she presses her palm flat against her mouth.
I move to the bed. She holds up her hand.
"Don't. Not right now."
I stop. Every instinct I have says go to her, hold her, absorb this for her the way I've been absorbing everything since the diner. But she said don't, and that word means something from a woman who's had too many people ignore it.
"I need to think," she says. "About all of it. About Brianna. About what happens when this is over. About what this is between us and whether it's real or whether I'm just clinging to the first person who made me feel safe."
The words land exactly where she aims them.
"Harper."
"You were supposed to be visiting your uncle.
I was supposed to be hiding. Neither of us planned this.
" She pulls her knees up, and I can see the walls rebuilding in real time, brick by brick, the same walls she had up when she walked into this town in a bad wig and broken shoes.
"What happens when they catch him? When I go back to LA and you go back to DC?
When I'm Harper West again and you're the security consultant who had a thing with a client? "
"You're not a client."
"Then what am I?"
The question sits between us, and I don't have an answer that doesn't sound like a promise I haven't figured out how to keep.
"I think you should go," she says quietly.
I stand. Walk to the door. Turn back.
She's sitting on the bed in my shirt with tears she won't let fall and her hands locked around her knees, and she looks like exactly what she is: a woman who has been betrayed by everyone close enough to matter, trying to figure out if I'm going to be next.
I leave. Close the door behind me.
Stand in the hallway for a long time before I walk downstairs and out into the August heat and all the way to my uncle's porch, where I sit in the chair and open the Wendell Berry to a page I know by heart.
The words blur. All I can see is her face when she asked me what she is and I couldn't answer.
I knew the answer. I've known it since the diner.
She's the one I want to keep.
And I have no idea how to keep someone whose life is built for leaving.