27. Tony
TONY
Icouldn't paint.
The brushes were clean. The canvas was prepped. Morning light was doing that thing it does in early spring. Everything sharper than it has a right to.
Perfect conditions. My hands wouldn't cooperate.
I cleaned three brushes I'd already cleaned. Rearranged the jars of turpentine. Stared at the blank white rectangle and saw nothing worth putting on it.
The studio smelled like linseed oil and cold air. I'd left the window cracked overnight and the chill had settled into everything. The floor. The easel. My bones.
The problem wasn't inspiration. The problem was the woman on my cottage porch. The one who'd kicked my stepmother to the ground and held me. Then looked at me like she was carrying something heavier than anything I'd just confessed.
I set the brushes down and walked to the kitchen.
Mia was at the island. Black coffee, reading glasses perched on her nose, one of Dad's journals open in front of her.
She looked up when I came in. Smiled. The smile didn't quite land. It hovered around her mouth but her eyes were running calculations I couldn't see.
"Morning." I poured coffee. Sat across from her.
"Morning." She pushed her glasses up. "Sleep okay?"
"No."
She nodded. Honest answer deserved an honest response. "Me either."
We sat with that for a minute. Her coffee was black, same as mine. No sugar. No cream. One of the small things I'd learned about her that made me like her more than I should.
Outside the glass walls, the mountains were doing their thing. Standing there. Being enormous.
Angelina. I'd known her since I was thirteen years old. Knew what she did when she was humiliated.
She regrouped. She strategized. She came back sharper.
Yesterday I'd said words to her face that I'd carried for twenty years. I'd watched Mia put her on the ground. And Angelina had driven away on shaking legs.
She wouldn't stay shaken.
"Tony." Mia's voice, careful. "What are you thinking?"
"That she's not done."
Mia's hand tightened on her mug. Just slightly. "No. She's not."
My artist's eye did what it always does. Cataloging.
The tension in her shoulders. The way her thumb pressed white marks into the ceramic. The journal she wasn't reading.
"Whatever happens," I said, "we handle it."
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Gave me a nod that was half agreement and half something else I couldn't name.
Her phone buzzed.
Not the phone on the counter beside her coffee. A different one. The one she kept in her back pocket, the one she thought I hadn't noticed.
Her face changed.
It happened fast. The color left her cheeks. Her jaw set into a line I recognized from yesterday.
Her hand was already reaching for the phone. Eyes scanning the screen. Whatever she read made her stand up so fast her stool scraped the floor.
"There's someone in the tree line."
She was already moving. Not toward the windows. Toward the door.
"Mia." I followed her. "Mia, wait."
She didn't wait. She pushed through the back door and walked toward the cottage with a certainty that stopped me cold.
She wasn't scanning. She wasn't searching. She was walking in a straight line toward the pines at the eastern edge of the property like she had coordinates.
I'm a foot taller than her. My stride is longer. I caught up in seconds. She was still ahead of me, cutting through wet grass, boots leaving dark tracks, focus locked on a point in the trees.
"There." She pointed.
I saw him.
A man crouching in the tree line. Forty yards out. Dark jacket. A camera with a lens long enough to see into bedrooms.
He was aimed at the cottage.
"Hey!" Mia's voice cracked through the morning air.
The man's head snapped up. He scrambled backward, branches catching his jacket, and then he was running.
Crashing through the underbrush with the camera banging against his chest. Gone in seconds.
I stood at the edge of my property, heart hammering, staring into empty trees.
Someone had been photographing my home. My bedroom. The cottage where Mia slept. The windows. The walls that were mostly glass. I'd built this house to let the light in. Never once considered that the light goes both ways.
"He's gone." Mia's breathing was controlled. Too controlled. Like someone who'd trained herself to manage panic.
"How did you know where to look?"
She blinked. "I saw movement from the kitchen window."
"You weren't looking at the window. You were looking at the journal."
A beat of silence. Her expression shifted by a fraction. "Peripheral vision."
I filed that away. Added it to the list.
We walked to where the man had been crouching. The ground was scuffed. Boot prints in soft earth. Pine needles pushed flat in a circle.
He'd been there long enough to leave impressions. Long enough for his knees to dig grooves in the dirt.
And there, half-buried where he'd scrambled away, a lens cap. I picked it up. Turned it over.
Professional grade. The kind of equipment that cost more than most people's cars. This wasn't a hiker with a hobby. This was someone hired.
My phone was in my hand before I made the conscious decision to call.
Garrett picked up on the second ring. My lawyer. The man who'd been handling the Rossi estate since Dad died.
"Tony. Early for you."
"I need to know what happens when someone takes photographs of a private residence from public land."
A pause. I could hear him thinking. "Depends on what's in the photographs."
"My home. My bedroom. A woman who lives on my property."
Another pause, longer. "From public land, photographs aren't criminal. But in a custody dispute, they become evidence."
He let that settle before continuing. "Cohabitation with an unmarried partner can be introduced by an opposing party. To establish an unfit home environment."
The words landed in my stomach like rocks.
"She's building a case."
"If what you're describing is connected to Angelina Marshall's recent contact, then yes. Those images give her leverage with a family court judge."
I thanked him. Hung up.
Stood at the tree line holding a lens cap that told me everything I needed to know about what Angelina did when she was humiliated.
She sent someone with a camera. The way other people send flowers. Precise. Calculated. A woman who'd learned to destroy people without raising her voice.
Mia was on the cottage porch. Arms wrapped around herself, phone in her hand. Not the phone from the kitchen counter. The other one.
She was typing fast, thumbs moving with purpose. She saw me coming and slid it into her back pocket.
Another entry on the list.
The same porch where yesterday I'd told her the worst thing I'd ever carried. The same steps where she'd held me. Wood still cold from the night.
Her hand was ice cold when I took it.
"Angelina hired that photographer. It's for the custody case. Photographs of us living together, Avery in the house. She's building a file."
Mia's face went white.
Not the kind of white that comes with bad news about a custody dispute. Something deeper.
Her pupils dilated. Her hand went rigid in mine. She looked like a woman who'd been told the building was on fire and the exits were locked.
"Hey." I squeezed her hand. "Mia. It's a legal tactic. Garrett says they're not even criminal."
"The photographs." Her voice was thin. "How clear are they?"
"Clear enough to identify faces."
She flinched. Full body. Like I'd touched a wound she'd been hiding.
I'd been watching Mia for weeks. Since before I loved her. Since the days when she was just the woman in my library. Pushing her glasses up. Laughing at things in Dad's journals. Not knowing I was watching from behind a canvas.
I'd watched her lock her cottage door every night. Check her phone with a frequency that had nothing to do with social media. Flinch when strangers stood too close.
Drive away before dawn and come back with a lie about not sleeping. Search results for "Mia Hayes" that returned nothing. Not a high school yearbook. Not a social media account. Not a single trace of a woman who'd existed for twenty-eight years before arriving in my town.
And now this. Terror that went bone-deep over photographs of her face.
"Mia." I kept my voice steady. "I need you to tell me what's going on."
She looked at me. Her eyes were wet. The war behind them was visible. Truth pressing against the lie, trying to break through.
She shook her head. "Not yet. Please."
The "please" did it. Broke something in my chest that anger couldn't have touched.
Because it wasn't defiance. It wasn't manipulation. It was a woman begging for more time. Time to find the courage to tell me something that scared her more than a man with a camera in the trees.
So I didn't push.
Both hands on her face. Tilting her chin up. Those brown eyes looking at me like I was the only safe thing in her world and she was about to lose me.
"Okay," I said. "Not yet."
She closed her eyes. Exhaled.
I pulled her against me. She pressed her forehead into my chest. I could feel her heart going fast against my ribs. Too fast. Panic fast.
I held her on the porch where I'd said the word "rape" for the first time in my life.
The man in the trees. His expensive camera. His professional-grade lens. The boot prints and the knee grooves. He'd been there for a while.
Long enough to photograph the cottage. The bedroom windows. Her face.
Angelina now had clear images of Mia.
And Angelina, yesterday, had looked at Mia with a flicker of recognition and said, "Who are you?" Like she was trying to place a face she'd seen before. A voice she'd heard. A woman she'd once disliked quite a bit.
When those photos reached Angelina's hands, the flicker would become a flame.
Held Mia tighter. Stared over her head at the tree line where the man had been crouching.
Beyond it, the ridge rose against a pale sky. The mountains looked different this morning. Not protective. Not majestic. Just tall. Full of places to hide.
A bird called from somewhere in the pines. The sound hung in the air, thin and sharp, and then nothing.
Somewhere out there, someone was looking at pictures of the woman in my arms. Studying her face. Connecting it to a name I didn't know yet.
A name that would explain everything. The locked doors. The burner phone. The terror. The lies. The reason a woman with no past washed up in a town where nobody looks twice.
I didn't know the name. Didn't know the story.
But those photos just gave someone what they needed to find her.