32. Mia
MIA
Lucas spread the photographs across the kitchen table like a dealer laying cards.
I didn't want to look. Tony sat beside me, his whole body rigid in the chair. I could feel the weight of what was coming before Lucas said a word.
The kitchen smelled like Sophia's rosemary bread from that morning. The windows were dark. Avery had been asleep for an hour, tucked under her star blanket with Gerald the stuffed elephant pressed to her chest.
I'd read her two chapters of a talking-animals book. She'd corrected my badger voice. Twice.
Now I sat at the same table where we'd made cookies. Where I'd told Tony my real name. Where the worst and best conversations of my life had happened.
And I watched Lucas line up evidence against a man I thought I knew.
"Oliver Marchand," Lucas said. He tapped the first photograph.
A candid shot, grainy, taken from a distance.
Oliver on a New York sidewalk, winter coat, coffee cup, briefcase.
"Born in the Pacific Northwest. Raised there until fourteen.
Boarding school in Switzerland. Then Columbia. Then five years in Manhattan."
Tony's hand was on my knee under the table. I don't think he knew he'd put it there. His fingers pressed into the fabric of my jeans, steady and warm.
I covered his hand with mine because I needed something to hold on to. Because the photographs kept coming and each one made the room feel smaller.
"His family's net worth," Lucas said. He slid a printed page across the table. I read the number. Read it again.
"That can't be right."
"It's right." Lucas leaned back in his chair.
"Old European money. Real estate holdings across three continents.
His grandfather built half of Zurich's financial district.
His mother's side owns shipping routes through Southeast Asia.
" He paused. "Oliver Marchand could buy this town and every town surrounding it without touching his checking account. "
Oliver at the Lumia flashed through my mind. His hoodie. His easy laugh. The Patek Philippe under his sleeve that I'd noticed once and filed away without knowing what it meant.
"He arrived in Rockford shortly after you did," Lucas said. He was looking at me now. Direct. Professional. The same calm voice he'd used when he told me about the safe house in Rockford. Back when I thought I could outrun my own name.
"How shortly?" I asked.
"Days."
"His apartment in New York." Lucas placed another photograph on the table. A building. Glass and steel, Upper East Side.
My stomach turned over.
I used to walk past buildings like that on my way to the studio. And I never once looked up and thought about who might be looking down.
Tony hadn't moved. He hadn't spoken since Lucas sat down. I glanced at him.
His jaw was set. Not the way it had been in the cottage that first morning when he'd been processing the weight of every lie I'd told him. This was different.
This was the look of a man doing math. Running probabilities. Calculating distance and motive and risk with a precision that would have terrified me if it weren't aimed at keeping us safe.
I'd watched him paint enough times to recognize the stillness. When Tony was working through something complex, he went quiet. The quieter he got, the more dangerous the conclusion.
"He recognized you," Lucas continued. "At Emma's coffeehouse, weeks ago. He remembered what you were wearing two days before he met you."
I remembered that. The blue cardigan. Oliver had mentioned it casually, turning it into charm.
As if noticing what a woman wore was flattering instead of alarming. I'd smiled and changed the subject. I'd thought he was harmless.
I'd thought a lot of things were harmless before I woke up in a hospital with a bullet in my spine.
"He asked about Tony before he ever met him. He asked about the property. He asked about Avery."
Tony's hand tightened on my knee.
"And he's dating Emma," I said. The words tasted wrong.
Emma, who tucked her hair behind her ear whenever Oliver walked in. Emma, who had started smiling differently since he'd arrived.
She poured him coffee every morning. Called him "love" in that warm British way of hers. And she had no idea that the man across her counter might be the reason I woke up sweating at three in the morning.
"He's dating your closest friend in Rockford," Lucas confirmed. "The person you see most often outside this house."
The kitchen was quiet. The refrigerator hummed. Outside, wind moved through the pines.
I thought about the grocery store. Brooks saying my name. The calm in his blue eyes.
I'd been so certain that Elijah was the threat. I'd spent nights replaying that encounter, dissecting every word, every tilt of his head.
What if I'd been looking at the wrong man the entire time?
What if the real threat was sitting across from my best friend while I replayed Brooks's voice in the cereal aisle? Laughing at her jokes. Learning her schedule. Mapping the distance between Emma's coffeehouse and my cottage.
I'd spent ten years reading people on camera. Politicians who lied through polished teeth. CEOs who buried scandals under charity galas.
I was good at it. I was one of the best. And I hadn't seen this.
Tony stood up. The chair scraped against the floor. He was on his feet before I could react, his hands flat on the table, leaning forward.
"I'm going to find him."
"Sit down," Lucas said.
"He's been in this town for weeks. He's been in Emma's coffeehouse. He's been asking about my daughter."
"Tony." Lucas didn't raise his voice. He lifted one hand, palm out, the way you'd calm a spooked horse. "Sit down and listen to me."
Tony's shoulders were locked. His arms were taut. I could see the vein in his neck, the one that appeared when he was holding something back.
"If Oliver is the stalker," Lucas said, steady and measured, "and you confront him, you've shown our hand. He knows we're looking at him. He adapts. He runs. Or worse, he accelerates. He moves the timeline up because he knows the window is closing."
Tony didn't sit. His eyes were fixed on Lucas.
"If Oliver is not the stalker," Lucas continued, "and you confront him, you've spooked an innocent man. And the real threat, the one watching all of this, sees you chasing shadows. He knows your attention is in the wrong place. He gets bolder."
The logic was clean. Airtight. I hated it because it meant sitting still when everything in the room screamed to move.
"Either way," Lucas said, "acting on impulse makes this worse."
Tony stared at him for a long time. I watched his hands on the table. His fingers were spread wide, pressing into the wood. He sat back down. It took everything he had.
His fists stayed clenched on the table. I put my hand over his again.
He didn't unclench. But he didn't pull away.
"I'm running deeper checks," Lucas said. "Financial records. Travel patterns. Phone metadata. We'll know within days whether Oliver Marchand is a threat or a coincidence."
"And until then?" Tony's voice was level. Controlled. The kind of controlled that made the hair on my arms stand up because I knew what lived underneath it.
"Until then, he stays in the dark. You treat him like you've always treated him. Polite. Distant. Nothing changes."
"Nothing changes," Tony repeated. The words came out flat.
"Your team is in place." Lucas nodded once, an acknowledgment of the new reality. Dominic's people. Tony's money. The counter-surveillance sweeps that had started the morning after the meeting in Carbondale. "Let them do their job. Let me do mine."
Tony agreed. Barely. A single nod that cost him something in his neck.
I could see what it cost him. Every cell in his body was built for action. For painting and building and shaping things with his hands.
Sitting still while a potential threat walked free in a town that held everything he loved was something I wouldn't wish on anyone.
I thought about the man I'd met months ago. The recluse who wouldn't come out of his studio. Who watched from behind glass walls and painted ghosts of a woman he refused to speak to.
That man was gone. The man beside me hired security firms and overrode FBI protocols. He sat in meetings with ex-Special Forces operatives without blinking.
He'd done all of that in the span of days. For me. For Avery.
For the family he'd built out of broken pieces and stubbornness and love he'd been afraid to name.
And now he was being asked to sit on his hands while Oliver Marchand walked through Rockford like he belonged here.
Lucas gathered the photographs. Slid them back into a manila folder. He stood, buttoned his jacket, and paused at the door.
"I'll call when I have something." He looked at me. Then at Tony. "Both of you. Stay the course."
The door closed behind him. The kitchen filled up with silence.
Tony walked to the window. He stood there with his back to me, looking out at the dark. The mountains were invisible. The tree line was a black edge against a blacker sky.
"He's been here for weeks," Tony said. "In Emma's coffeehouse. Talking to our friends. Eating muffins and telling stories about snowboarding." His voice was quiet. Precise. Every word measured.
I moved to stand beside him. Our reflections stared back at us from the glass, dim and ghostlike.
"And he's dating Emma," Tony said.
"Lucas will figure it out."
Tony was quiet for a long time. His breath fogged the window.
His hands hung at his sides, loose now, but I knew the looseness was a lie. He was coiled. Waiting.
"What if it's not Oliver?" he said.
I turned to look at him.
"What if Oliver is nothing. What if he's exactly what he says he is. A rich kid who likes snowboarding and stumbled into a small town and fell for a girl with a British accent." Tony's reflection met my reflection in the glass. "And the real threat is someone we're not looking at."
I didn't answer.
I couldn't.
Because I'd been thinking the same thing since the grocery store. Since those blue eyes found mine in the cereal aisle and a pleasant voice said a name that shouldn't exist in Colorado.
Have a good day, Ms. Winslow.
Oliver had red flags. Oliver had connections and coincidences and a fortune that could fund anything.
But Oliver had never looked at me the way Elijah Brooks had looked at me in that store. Oliver's eyes didn't go still and empty when he said my name.
Oliver didn't smile like a man who already knew the ending.
I should tell Lucas. I should say it out loud: I don't think it's Oliver. I think it's Brooks. I should have said it tonight, in this kitchen, with the photographs spread out and the evidence stacked against the wrong man.
Tomorrow. I'd tell him tomorrow.
Tonight I just wanted to stand next to Tony and pretend the world outside these glass walls didn't exist.
I leaned into his side. His arm came around my shoulders. Neither of us spoke.
The wind picked up outside. The pines bent and straightened. Somewhere past the tree line, past the ridge, past the places Dominic's team swept every morning, the dark stretched on and on.
I stood there, pressed against the man I loved, thinking about a man who smiled like he had all the time in the world.