CHAPTER FOUR MAREN
The second security team arrived on a Monday, four additional men in dark, unremarkable vehicles who did not introduce themselves and did not need to, because their presence spoke plainly enough on its own.
My driver, a soft-spoken man named Teo who’d worked for Rhodes’s family for over a decade, now took a different route to anywhere I needed to go each day, apparently at random, though I noticed after the second week that they always, without exception, avoided the community garden.
“I can still walk there,” I told Rhodes over dinner, three weeks into the new arrangements. “It’s two blocks. I’ve walked it a hundred times.”
“I know you can walk it.”
“Then why does Teo take the long way around every single time, like the garden’s radioactive?”
Rhodes set down his fork, and I watched him choose his words carefully, the way he did when he knew a subject was fragile and wanted to handle it without breaking anything.
“Because that’s where the photograph was taken from.
Bram wants to limit your exposure to locations we know someone’s already surveilled, until we understand who and why. ”
“So I don’t get the roses anymore.”
“You get the roses. You just get them with someone walking three feet behind you instead of alone, for now. That’s not forever, Maren. It’s until we know more.”
I wanted to argue. Some part of me understood, even as the frustration built in my chest, that his logic wasn’t unreasonable, that a woman who’d been photographed without her knowledge from an unknown vantage point had every right to want a little more caution around that exact location for a while.
But the accumulation of small restrictions, each one reasonable in isolation, had started to add up to something that felt, some mornings, like watching my own life get smaller one careful decision at a time.
“I need you to understand something,” I said. “Every single one of these things you’re describing is reasonable on its own. The driver. The routes. Even the roses, for now. But I need you to notice when the sum of all the reasonable things starts to look like something else.”
“I am noticing,” he said, and reached for my hand across the table. “I promise you I am. If it ever starts feeling like a cage to you, I need you to tell me immediately, and I mean immediately, not after you’ve spent three weeks resenting me for it.”
“I’m telling you now.”
“Then I’m hearing you now.” He turned my hand over in his, tracing the pad of his thumb across my palm the way he did when he wanted to say something with his hands that he wasn’t quite finding the words for.
“I love you in a way that sometimes makes me want to build a wall around the entire world just to keep you safe inside it. I know that’s not always the same thing as loving you well.
I’m trying to hold both of those at once. ”
It was, I thought that night, a genuinely honest answer, the kind of self-awareness that had made me fall in love with him in the first place, a man powerful enough to solve almost any problem with money or authority who still, somehow, understood that the people he loved needed room to breathe inside his solutions.
The gala for the children’s hospital fell on a Thursday, an event I’d chaired the planning committee for since February, the kind of project that had given me something entirely my own inside a marriage that sometimes threatened to swallow every hour of my day into Rhodes’s schedule instead of mine.
Rhodes canceled our attendance nine hours beforehand, a text and then a call, because the venue’s security team hadn’t been able to complete an adequate assessment on short notice after a last-minute change in the guest list.
“I’ve spent five months on this,” I said, standing in the kitchen with my dress already picked out, already hanging on the closet door like a held breath, silk the color of the peonies the florist had sworn wouldn’t photograph well.
“I know.”
“People are expecting me, Rhodes. I’m the chair. I’m supposed to give opening remarks in nine hours.”
“I’ll make a donation that embarrasses every other name on that list. I’ll call the director myself tonight and explain everything, tell her it’s entirely on me, not you.
But I’m not putting you in a room I haven’t cleared, not with three hundred strangers and a security team that just told me they can’t guarantee the perimeter. ”
“You cleared it in February. You cleared it in March. What changed?”
“What changed is a stranger photographed you sitting on a bench two blocks from our house,” he said, and his voice cracked slightly on the word photographed, the only sign that the calm was costing him something enormous to maintain.
“I can’t do the math on that risk and still let you walk into an unsecured ballroom with three hundred people I’ve never vetted. ”
I sat down at the kitchen island because standing suddenly felt like too much effort, the dress on the closet door mocking me from across the house.
“Protecting me can’t mean erasing my life, Rhodes.
I need you to hear that as something other than an argument.
I need you to hear it as information about what I can survive and what I can’t. ”
He crossed the kitchen and crouched in front of my stool, taking both my hands in his, and for a moment the fear in his face was so unguarded that I forgave him before he’d even apologized, the way I’d forgiven him for a hundred smaller overreactions over six years because the fear underneath them had always, until now, been proportional to something real.
“I hear you,” he said. “I do. I’m not trying to erase anything.
I’m trying to keep you breathing long enough to be furious with me about missed galas for the next forty years.
Give me that trade. I’ll take your anger over your absence every single time. ”
We made peace with each other that night the way we always had, with honesty instead of grand gestures, him calling the hospital director himself while I listened from the next room, his voice warm and apologetic and entirely convincing, a check written the next morning that made the director cry with gratitude over the phone.
I believed, lying against his chest afterward, that we’d found the edge of what fear could take from us before it took something we couldn’t get back.
We spent the evening of the gala at home instead, an improvised celebration of our own, Rhodes ordering in from the restaurant we’d had our first date at years earlier, the two of us eating on the living room floor because neither of us could be bothered to set the table properly.
He put on the ridiculous playlist he’d made for our wedding reception, half the songs included more for the memories attached than any actual musical merit, and pulled me up to dance in the middle of the living room in my sweatpants while he was still in his work shirt with the sleeves rolled up.
“This is objectively better than a ballroom full of strangers,” he said, spinning me clumsily under his arm.
“You’re only saying that because you don’t have to give opening remarks tonight.”
“I’m saying it because I get you entirely to myself instead of sharing you with three hundred donors.
” He drew me back against his chest, swaying slowly now instead of spinning, his chin resting against the top of my head.
“I know I took something from you today. The gala mattered to you. I’m not going to pretend a home-cooked dinner and a bad playlist makes up for that. ”
“It doesn’t make up for it. But it helps.”
“Then I’ll take helps,” he said, and kissed the top of my head, and for the rest of that evening, dancing badly in our living room with takeout containers scattered across the coffee table, I let myself believe that whatever fear had entered our marriage over the past month, it hadn’t yet touched the parts of us that mattered most.
The alarm woke us at 2:14 in the morning.
Bram’s voice on the house line was flat and fast, the tone of a man trained not to let panic show even when it was entirely warranted.
Someone had breached the perimeter fence on the north side, cut through in a location designed to avoid three separate camera angles at once, a level of familiarity with our system that told Rhodes, before Bram even finished the sentence, that this wasn’t Fenwick working alone, wasn’t an angry man with a grudge and a wire cutter, but something colder and more professional than either of us had let ourselves imagine.
I sat up in bed and watched Rhodes pull on clothes in the dark, his movements fast and controlled, a man executing a plan he’d rehearsed a hundred times in his head without ever expecting to need it. “Stay here,” he said. “Lock the door behind me. Don’t open it for anyone but me or Bram.”
“Rhodes, wait.”
“Please, Maren. Please, just this once, do exactly what I ask without arguing with me about it.”
I did. I sat on the edge of our bed in the dark with the door locked, listening to the muffled shouts outside, the sweep of flashlights across the yard visible through the gap in the curtains, my heart hammering hard enough that I could feel it in my throat, and I understood, for the first time since the photograph arrived, exactly how frightened Rhodes had been underneath the careful calm he’d shown me for the past three weeks.
They didn’t reach the house. Whoever it was fled the moment the interior motion sensors triggered, gone before Bram’s team could clear the tree line, leaving nothing behind but a cut section of fence and a set of footprints that led to a road half a mile away where a car had clearly been waiting.
But the message had already arrived, more precise than any envelope could have delivered it: someone had studied our home closely enough to know exactly where the cameras couldn’t see, exactly how long the interior sensors took to trigger, exactly which six seconds gave them the best chance of reaching whatever they’d come for.
Rhodes stood at our bedroom window for a long time after the all-clear, watching the flashlights sweep the dark yard below, his jaw tight and his hands braced against the windowsill hard enough that his knuckles had gone pale.
I came to stand beside him, my arms wrapped around myself against a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature of the room, and I understood, watching his shoulders, that something in him had already started making a decision he hadn’t told me about yet, a decision forming somewhere behind his eyes that he wasn’t ready to say out loud, not even to himself.
“Rhodes,” I said quietly. “Talk to me.”
“Not tonight,” he said, and pulled me against him instead, his chin resting on the top of my head, his heartbeat too fast against my ear. “Tonight I just need to hold you. Tomorrow we’ll figure out what comes next.”
I didn’t know, standing in the circle of his arms with the last of the flashlights disappearing into the tree line, that tomorrow had already been decided, somewhere in the last week, by a man who loved me enough to consider almost anything reasonable if it meant keeping me alive.