CHAPTER SEVENTEEN MAREN
Iheard about Fenwick’s capture the same way I’d heard about most things that month, secondhand, through a brief news alert that appeared on my phone while I was making breakfast, a small paragraph confirming an arrest connected to a corporate espionage case, Fenwick’s name buried three sentences in.
I stood at the counter reading it twice, waiting for the relief to arrive the way I imagined it should, and found instead a complicated tangle of feelings I hadn’t expected: relief, yes, but also a strange, hollow uncertainty about what the ending of the danger actually meant for everything that had happened around it.
I texted Bram to confirm the report was accurate, and he called instead of texting back, his voice careful. “It’s true. He’s in custody. I imagine Rhodes will want to talk to you himself, once he’s had a chance to process it.”
“Does he know I know?”
“Not yet. I’ll let him tell you in his own way.”
I spent the rest of that morning in a strange, suspended state, unable to settle into any of my usual routines, the notebook abandoned on the counter, the run I usually took left unfinished halfway through when I found myself simply standing at the edge of the property, staring out at the tree line, trying to understand what I actually wanted now that the external danger, at least, had finally ended.
Cal was at the kitchen table when the knock came, midway through helping me draft an email to the landlord about the apartment I’d found, the one with the bay window he’d remembered from years earlier, and he opened the door before I’d even reached the hallway, his easy familiarity with the house by that point almost proprietary.
I heard Rhodes’s voice before I saw him, low and careful, asking whether I was there, and I heard the pause that followed when he registered another man standing in the doorway of the house he still thought of as temporary, still thought of as his to reclaim on his own timeline, a pause that seemed to stretch far longer than the second or two it likely actually lasted.
“She’s inside,” Cal said, and I heard something deliberate in the flatness of it, a small, precise withholding of any further courtesy.
“Is she all right?”
“She’s fine. Better than fine, actually.”
Cal didn’t step aside right away. He didn’t need to say anything cruel; simply standing there, easy and unhurried in a house that wasn’t his, wearing one of my father’s old flannel shirts he’d borrowed from the closet the week before because the evenings had turned cool, did the work he wanted done without a single word.
I could picture, without seeing it, the exact effect it was having on Rhodes standing in the doorway, travel-worn and desperate, confronted with another man’s easy possession of a space he still considered his to walk back into.
I came around the corner in time to see Rhodes’s face do something raw and immediate, jealousy and confusion and something that looked almost like grief passing across it before he mastered the expression and looked past Cal to find me standing in the hallway.
His eyes moved over me quickly, checking for some visible sign of harm, the way they always had in the early days of any crisis, before settling on my face with an intensity that made my chest tighten despite everything.
“Maren,” he said, and something in his voice cracked on my name the way it hadn’t cracked since our wedding day.
He looked exhausted, his tie loosened past any pretense of formality, dark circles beneath his eyes that told me he hadn’t been sleeping any better than I had.
“It’s over. Fenwick’s in custody. You’re safe.
” He said it like it was the only sentence that mattered, and for two weeks it would have been. “I came to take you home.”
For a moment, neither of us said anything else, the three of us caught in an awkward, charged silence in a doorway that suddenly felt far too small.
Cal shifted his weight, clearly deciding whether to stay or go, and I watched Rhodes’s jaw tighten at the sight of him still standing there, still occupying space that felt, to Rhodes, like an intrusion on something private.
I looked at him standing in a doorway three states from the house we’d built together, and I felt something in me settle into an answer I hadn’t planned to give but recognized the moment it arrived, clear and complete and entirely my own.
“I am home,” I said.
The words hung in the air between us, small and enormous at once. I watched Rhodes’s face change, watched the hope he’d carried across three states drain out of it slowly, replaced by something that looked almost like physical pain.
“What does that mean?” he asked quietly.
“It means exactly what it sounds like, Rhodes. This is where I’ve been living. This is where my life is right now. You don’t get to arrive and declare it temporary just because you’ve decided the danger’s passed and the timeline is yours to set again.”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Didn’t you?” I asked, and I heard my own voice go hard in a way I hadn’t intended, weeks of accumulated hurt finding an outlet now that he was finally standing in front of me.
“You told me, with that exact certainty, that the second Fenwick was caught, everything would simply resume. You never once asked me whether I’d be ready for that.
You never once considered that two weeks of building a life without you might have actually changed something. ”
I watched it land. I watched him understand, in real time, exactly what he’d done, that he had spent two weeks treating my absence as temporary because he had known his own intentions the whole time, and had never once given me the chance to know them too.
He had expected me to trust a plan he’d refused to share, built on a promise he’d broken the day he said the word yes in our study, and he was only now discovering, standing in a stranger’s doorway with another man’s presence radiating from behind me, that a marriage cannot survive on one partner’s private certainty alone.
“Can we talk,” he said, his voice quieter now, some of the certainty draining out of it. “Please. Just the two of us.”
Cal looked to me before he moved, a question in his eyes that I answered with a small nod, and he stepped past Rhodes into the yard without a word, though I saw the two men’s eyes meet for a brief, charged moment as he passed, something unspoken and unfriendly exchanged between them that I refused to examine too closely in that moment.
I noticed, too, the way Rhodes’s shoulders tightened as Cal brushed past him, a flare of something proprietary and jealous he didn’t bother fully hiding, though to his credit he said nothing, made no move to challenge or confront the other man, simply stood aside and let him pass.
“Come in,” I said finally, stepping back to let Rhodes into a house he’d never seen, watching him take in the details of it, the notebook on the counter, the rearranged furniture, the small, unmistakable evidence of a life I’d built without him.
Something in his face registered each detail, and I watched him understand, piece by piece, exactly how much had changed while he’d been three states away chasing down a threat he’d never fully let me help him fight.