23. Tony
TONY
Three in the morning and I couldn't stop counting.
Not paint strokes. Not the hours since Mia fell asleep in my bed with her back pressed against my chest. I was counting lies.
Small ones. The kind most people wouldn't notice.
But I wasn't most people. I was an artist who'd spent his life studying the distance between what people showed and what they hid. And Mia Hayes had more distance than anyone I'd ever met.
The studio was dark around me. I stood in the doorway watching the lake through the glass walls.
Black mirror, no stars. A low cloud ceiling had swallowed them whole.
My bare feet were freezing on the concrete. I didn't care.
The inventory had started as a feeling. A low hum at the base of my skull that something was off.
Now it was a list. And the list was getting long.
The flinch. That was the first one.
My hand on her lower back in the kitchen, weeks ago. A touch that should have been nothing.
Her entire body had locked. Not surprise. Pain.
Old pain, buried deep. The kind that lived in muscle memory. A ridge of scar tissue under her shirt that she never let me see.
The locked door. Every single night, without fail.
Locked. Every single night, without fail. We lived on a private road on a mountainside six miles from the nearest neighbor.
Sophia didn't lock hers. I didn't lock mine. Mia locked hers like she expected someone to come through it.
The phone. Not her regular phone. The other one.
A cheap flip model she kept in her jacket pocket. She checked it when she thought I wasn't watching.
I'd seen it twice. Both times she'd palmed it and slid it away before I could register more than the shape.
The freezing. Not cold. The other kind.
A stranger approaching in the grocery store. A car she didn't recognize on the road. Someone walking too close behind her on Main Street.
Her shoulders would go rigid and her chin would drop a fraction. Eyes sweeping the exits.
Not panic. Something deeper. Something practiced. This woman had been afraid before. Many times. And she'd learned how to move through it.
The pre-dawn drives. They'd started a few weeks ago, out of nowhere.
She'd slip out before sunrise. Come back before Avery woke up.
She always had a reason. Couldn't sleep. Wanted coffee. Needed to clear her head.
The reasons changed. The pattern didn't.
I pressed my forehead against the glass. The cold bit into my skin.
I loved this woman. That hadn't changed. It wasn't going to change.
But loving someone and knowing them were two different things. And the gap between the two was keeping me up at three in the morning with a list of questions I couldn't ask.
Morning came gray and heavy. I'd slept maybe two hours on the studio couch. Not sleeping so much as lying there, waiting for the dark to give up and turn into morning.
Showered. Dressed. Drove to the diner on Route 9.
Not Emma's coffeehouse. Emma talked. Everyone in her coffeehouse talked.
This conversation needed to stay between two people.
Jamie was already in the back booth when I walked in. Two mugs of coffee on the table. He'd ordered mine black, the way I'd been drinking it for twenty years.
"You look terrible," he said.
"Thanks."
"I mean it. When's the last time you slept through the night?"
The booth creaked as I sat down across from him. Wrapped my hands around the mug. The warmth seeped into my fingers.
"I need to ask you something," I said. "And I need you to be honest with me."
Jamie's expression shifted from casual concern to full attention. His diagnostic face. The one he wore when he was about to deliver bad news about my retinas.
Except this time, he was waiting for me to deliver.
"Mia," I said.
"What about her?"
I laid it out. All of it.
The flinch and the scar I'd never seen. The locked doors. The second phone.
The freezing around strangers. The pre-dawn drives that started weeks ago. The way her phone checking had tripled in recent weeks.
Not her regular phone. The other one.
Jamie listened without interrupting. He stirred his coffee once, set the spoon on the saucer, and folded his hands on the table.
"Am I imagining things?" I asked.
"No." He didn't hesitate. "You're not."
The diner was quiet around us. A waitress refilled the coffee pot behind the counter. Country music played low from a speaker near the kitchen.
"She's running from something," Jamie said.
"The locked doors, the flinching, the second phone. That's a person living in fear, Tony. Normal people don't carry burner phones."
"I know."
"What are you going to do?"
"I want to ask her."
Jamie shook his head.
"If she's in danger, pushing too hard could make her bolt. She came here for a reason. She's staying for a reason."
He paused. "If you corner her, you might lose the only chance she has of telling you on her own."
I stared at my coffee. He was right. I hated that he was right.
"Let her come to you," Jamie said.
"She will. Whatever she's carrying, it's getting heavier."
He turned his mug in a slow circle. "I can see it. You can see it. She won't be able to hold it much longer."
I nodded. Took a long drink of coffee that had already gone lukewarm.
"There's something else," I said.
Jamie waited.
"I looked her up."
His eyebrows rose a fraction. "And?"
"Nothing." I set the mug down.
"I searched 'Mia Hayes' online. No social media. No employment history."
I turned the mug between my palms. "No records of any kind before Rockford. She didn't exist until she walked into my house."
Jamie was quiet for a long time.
"That's not a red flag," he said. "That's a fire alarm."
"I know."
"Tony."
"I know, Jamie."
He leaned forward. "What are you going to do?"
The same question. Different weight this time.
"I'm going to wait," I said. "I'm going to watch. And I'm going to be ready for whatever comes."
Jamie studied me. Looking for damage. Looking for what was breaking beneath the surface.
"You love her," he said. Not a question.
"Yeah."
"Even with all of this."
"Especially with all of this."
He picked up his coffee. Drank. Set it down.
"Then don't let her run."
The drive home was cold. Windows down. Mountain air tasting like pine and damp earth.
The last edge of winter clinging to a season that wanted to be spring. My hands were steady on the wheel.
My chest was not.
Before going inside, I sat in the car and watched the cottage through the windshield.
Morning light. Thin and silver. The kind that flattened everything to shapes without warmth.
Mia was on the porch. Book in one hand. Mug balanced on the railing.
Her reading glasses sat halfway down her nose. She pushed them up with one finger. Absentminded. A gesture she didn't know I cataloged the way I cataloged color.
The light caught her hair. She laughed at something in the book.
Out loud. Alone. Genuine.
Her head tipped back and her shoulders shook. For three seconds she was just a woman enjoying a story on a porch in the mountains.
I was falling in love with a woman I didn't fully know.
The thought landed the way all truths land. Too late to stop. Too real to deny.
Inside, Avery was in the kitchen with Sophia. She sat at the island with a bowl of cereal and a marker in her hand. Drawing on a napkin.
"Daddy, look." She held it up. A lopsided house with smoke from the chimney and what was either a dog or a very large hamster in the front yard.
"That's our house. And that's Gerald's cousin. His name is Frank."
"Frank the hamster?"
"Frank the caterpillar, Daddy. He lives behind the shed. I asked Gerald and Gerald said Frank is his favorite cousin."
"Naturally."
Sophia set a plate in front of me. Toast, eggs, sliced avocado. She gave me a look that said eat or I will stand here until you do.
I ate.
Avery went back to her drawing. Sophia hummed under her breath and started wiping the counter.
Somewhere beneath the ordinary morning, the silence ticked.
The afternoon. The studio. My laptop open on the workbench.
I'd told myself I was checking gallery inquiries. I wasn't.
Everything I could find about Mia Hayes. Social media platforms. Public records. Alumni databases.
News archives.
Nothing.
No college graduation photos. No tagged posts from friends.
No old social media account abandoned years ago. No professional profile listing previous employers.
No hometown newspaper mentioning her name in a school play program. No local fundraiser. No company newsletter. Nothing.
Everyone leaves a digital trail. Even people who try not to.
Yearbook pages scanned by nostalgic classmates. Tagged photos at someone else's wedding. A mention in a graduation announcement.
Something.
Mia had none of it.
The woman who read to my daughter every night. Who left tiny notes in the margins of Dad's journals. Who locked her door every night and carried a phone she hid and checked over her shoulder in grocery stores.
She had no past before this town.
She was a ghost.
The laptop closed with a soft click. The Avery and Mia canvas stood behind me, covered with a sheet. Every brushstroke was mapped in my hands.
The woman in that painting. The woman on my porch this morning, laughing alone.
I loved her. That hadn't changed.
But I needed to know who she was. Not to judge her. Not to leave her.
To protect her from whatever she was running from.
Because I'd spent my whole life failing to protect the people I loved.
Mom died and I couldn't stop it. Dad died and I couldn't stop it.
Angelina happened and I couldn't stop it. Charlotte died and I couldn't stop it.
Not again.
Outside, through the glass walls, the cottage light went on. She was awake. Or maybe she'd never gone to sleep.
Her shadow moved behind the curtain.
Whoever you are, I'm not going anywhere.
But you're going to tell me the truth. One way or another.