38. Mia
MIA
Rockford smelled different after Tuscany.
Not worse. Just smaller. The air still carried pine and cold river water and something mineral from the mountains. But my lungs had learned Italian air. Warm stone and wild thyme and jasmine that climbed everything. Coming back was like putting on shoes after running barefoot for a week.
I missed it already.
The Lumia was half full. A weekday morning. I'd stopped tracking days.
The corner table by the bookshelf was open and I slid into it like coming home. My mug was already waiting. Emma had seen me pull up.
"So." She set the coffee down and dropped into the chair across from me. "Italy."
"Italy."
"And?"
"And what?"
She leaned forward. "Was it romantic? Did he carry you across a vineyard? Did you eat pasta under the stars? I need details, Mia. I'm living vicariously through you because my love life is a dumpster fire."
I wrapped my hands around the mug. The coffee was perfect. Black, strong, the ceramic warm against my palms. "It was nice."
"Nice." She stared at me. "You go to Tuscany with the most gorgeous man in Colorado and you give me nice?"
"It was really nice."
She threw a sugar packet at me. I caught it. We both laughed.
"Fine," I said. "It was perfect. The villa was incredible. Avery lost her mind over the olive grove. Tony sketched every day. We walked to this little village market and bought tomatoes from a woman who called me Avery's Mimi."
Emma's whole face softened. "She called you Mimi?"
"Avery did. To the vendor. Just introduced me like that. 'My Mimi wants the big tomatoes.'"
Emma pressed her hand to her chest. "I'm going to cry."
"Don't cry."
"Too late." She fanned her face. The bell over the door chimed and she stood, wiping her eyes. "Hold that thought. Customer."
I opened my laptop and pulled up the journal transcription files. Glasses on. Two boxes of Ludo's journals left. The work wasn't urgent anymore. The critical entries had been found.
But there was something comforting about sitting in the old man's handwriting. His steady script. His love for Tony pressed into every page.
I was three paragraphs into a passage about a gallery opening in Milan when a voice came from above me.
"Mia! You're back."
Oliver Marchand stood next to my table. Leather jacket, hiking boots, coffee in one hand, the other shoved into his pocket. His smile was wide and easy. Dark curls falling across his forehead.
"Hey, Oliver." I closed my laptop halfway. Not all the way. A reflex. Protecting what was on the screen even though it was just handwriting. "How've you been?"
"Good. Great, actually. The resort's keeping me busy." He pulled out the chair Emma had vacated and sat without being invited. "How was the trip? Emma mentioned you guys went to Italy."
"It was wonderful."
"Avery must have gone nuts."
"She caught a lizard and gave it a royal title. Cried for an hour when it escaped."
He laughed. Warm and genuine. His eyes crinkled at the corners. He looked like a man enjoying a quiet morning. Nothing more.
"That tracks," he said. He sipped his coffee. Something complicated with foam. Emma had rolled her eyes making it. "You know, I keep thinking I've seen you somewhere. It's been bugging me for weeks."
My stomach dropped.
"Have you ever been on TV?"
The coffee cup stopped halfway to my mouth. The heat left my face. My fingers tightened around the ceramic handle. Everything in my body went cold and sharp and very, very still.
Breathe.
I'd been on live television for three years. I'd sat behind an anchor desk at a network affiliate in New York City. Millions of people watched me read the news five nights a week. I'd worn a blue blazer and pearl earrings and smiled the smile they taught me in media training.
I forced a laugh. It came out almost right.
"TV?" I set the mug down so he wouldn't see my hand shake. "I wish. I'd need a way better wardrobe for that."
Oliver grinned. "Fair enough. You've just got one of those faces, I guess. Familiar."
"I get that a lot." I didn't get that a lot.
He shrugged. Took another sip. Nodded toward the window. "Beautiful day out there. You should take a hike before the snow comes back. Trail behind the resort is incredible right now."
"Maybe I will."
He stood. Pushed the chair back in. "Tell Tony and Avery I said hi." He gave a little wave and crossed to the counter where Emma was already smiling at him.
I watched him go.
My hands were shaking under the table. Both of them. I pressed my palms flat against my thighs and counted to ten. Then twenty.
The café sounds were too loud. The espresso machine, someone's chair scraping, a phone buzzing on a table across the room.
The burner phone was in my bag. I pulled it out below the table. Typed with my thumb.
Oliver asked if I've been on TV.
Lucas's response came in twelve seconds.
Noted. Don't react. Stay in routine. I'm adding eyes on him.
The screen stared back at me. Phone away. A breath that didn't reach my lungs.
Get up. Walk out. Normal pace. Normal face.
Laptop closed. Bag packed. A ten on the table. I waved to Emma on the way out. She blew me a kiss. Oliver didn't look up from his phone.
The parking lot air hit me like a wall. Cool and thin and tasting of pine. I got into my car and gripped the steering wheel until my knuckles ached.
Here was the thing I couldn't say to Lucas.
I didn't think it was Oliver.
The question had landed like a grenade. My body had reacted accordingly. But my brain was doing something else entirely. Sorting. Filing. Cross-referencing the way it used to when I sat in a studio and interviewed politicians who were lying to my face.
Oliver's eyes when he asked the question were open. Curious. The kind of look you give someone when a memory is tickling the back of your skull and you can't quite grab it. He'd tilted his head the same way my college roommate used to when she was trying to place an actor in a movie.
That wasn't how a predator looked at prey.
I knew what a predator looked like. I'd been stalked.
I'd been shot. I'd spent a year looking over my shoulder in every parking lot and grocery store aisle.
I knew the difference between curiosity and obsession.
Between someone trying to place your face and someone who already owned it in their mind.
Oliver was curious. That was all.
But I couldn't prove it. I had no evidence. Just ten years of reading faces on camera and the gut feeling that wouldn't shut up. And gut feelings didn't hold up against a New York apartment and suspicious timelines and a Patek Philippe hidden under a hoodie.
So I kept it to myself. Because what if I was wrong?
The drive home took twelve minutes. Twelve minutes of gripping the wheel and thinking too hard.
The glass house was lit against the late afternoon sky. The mountains behind it were green and brown. Snow only on the peaks now. Spring had come to Rockford while we were gone and everything looked raw and new and a little too bright.
The cottage got my car. The main house got me. That's where I went now. The cottage was for sleeping and storing clothes. The main house was where my life happened.
Tony was in the kitchen.
Through the glass wall I could see him before I reached the door. He was at the counter cutting something. An apple, maybe. Sleeves rolled to his elbows. Bare feet on the tile.
His shoulders were relaxed in a way they hadn't been when we left for Italy. Tuscany had loosened something in him.
The door opened under my hand. Bag on the island.
He looked up. Read my face in half a second.
"What happened?"
My hand shook when I reached for a glass of water. The water splashed over the rim. Too hard on the counter.
Tony crossed the kitchen. He took the glass out of my hand. Set it on the counter behind me.
Then he cupped my face. Both hands. His palms warm and rough with charcoal and paint that never quite came off.
"Look at me."
I looked.
His eyes were dark. Steady. The kind of calm that came from deciding the world was not allowed to touch the people inside his hands.
"You're here. You're safe."
His thumbs traced my cheekbones. Slow. My breathing settled. My pulse slowing under the pressure of his palms against my jaw.
He didn't ask what happened. He just held my face and waited.
When my hands stopped shaking, I told him.
"Oliver asked if I'd ever been on TV."
Something shifted behind Tony's eyes. A stillness that was the opposite of calm. His hands didn't move from my face.
"He's not going to touch you."
The possessive edge in his voice should not have made me feel safer. It did.
"I already texted Lucas. He's escalating surveillance."
Tony nodded once. His thumb brushed the corner of my mouth. That tiny scar I never talked about. He touched it like he knew it was there. Like he'd mapped it a long time ago.
"What did your gut say?"
I blinked. Nobody had asked me that. Not Lucas. Not anyone.
"My gut says it's not him."
"Then it's not him."
"Tony, you can't just believe me because I have a feeling."
"I believe you because you spent ten years reading liars on camera and you're the smartest person I know."
Something cracked in my chest. Not pain. The opposite. The sound of someone trusting you when you barely trust yourself.
He kissed my forehead. Pulled me against his chest. I stood there in his kitchen with my shoes still on and his heartbeat under my ear. The fear drained out of me one muscle at a time.
That evening I sat on the cottage porch. The air was cool. Through the glass walls of the main house I could see Tony moving through the kitchen. Avery's silhouette in the living room, bouncing on the couch.
I looked out at the dark tree line. The meadow stretching toward the ridge. Something moved in the shadows between the pines. A deer, probably.
Dale's cameras covered that entire perimeter. The feeds were live. Everything was secure.
But sitting on that porch, watching the dark press against the edges of everything I loved, I had the oldest feeling a person can have.
The feeling of being watched.
I went inside. Locked the door. Turned off the porch light.
On a dirt road overlooking the property, a man with blue eyes lowered a pair of binoculars. The hacked camera feed on his phone already showed the same view from a better angle.
But Elijah Brooks liked watching with his own eyes.
It was more personal that way.