Chapter Five: Something Is Coming

"You're doing it again."

I looked up from the hem I was pinning.

Talia was leaning against my workroom doorframe with her arms crossed and that expression — the one that meant she had been watching me for longer than I realised and had decided to stop pretending she wasn't.

"Doing what," I said.

"That thing where you go very quiet and very busy at the same time." She pushed off the doorframe and came in. "It means you're scared."

"I'm working."

"Ivy."

"I have three hems due by Friday."

"And someone had a photograph of you coming out of your front door and was parked outside your son's school watching him." She sat down in the customer chair across from me. "So the hems can wait."

I set the fabric down.

She was right and we both knew it. I had spent the last hour moving between the workroom table and the kitchen and back again, keeping my hands occupied because occupied hands meant an occupied mind and an occupied mind didn't have to sit with what Fenne's text actually meant.

Someone had been outside Eli's school.

Watching.

Not coming in. Not approaching anyone. Just sitting in a car across from the gates for twenty minutes while my son was twenty feet away being completely unaware.

I picked up my phone and called Fenne.

She answered immediately. Fenne Halee had the kind of voice that was always one degree calmer than the situation required — twenty years of managing small children and anxious parents had given her that — and she delivered everything she knew without making it worse than it was.

"Dark car. Expensive. Parked across from the gates for about twenty minutes." A pause. "He didn't get out. Didn't approach the gate. One of the parents noticed and mentioned it to me after."

"What did he look like?"

"Big. Dark coat. They couldn't see his face well."

"Has he been there before?"

"Not that anyone saw. Yesterday was the first time." Her voice stayed even. "Ivy, should I be worried about Eli?"

"No. He's fine. I'll collect him myself every day until further notice." I kept my voice the same way she kept hers — steady, level, nothing in it that would travel. "If anyone comes to those gates asking about him, you call me before you say a single word to them."

"Understood. Absolutely."

I hung up.

Talia was watching me from the customer chair.

"Well?" she said.

"It was Rhys." I sat back down. "Or someone he sent. Same description."

"So while that man was in my bakery asking questions about you," she said slowly, "someone else was already at Eli's school."

"Yes."

"They split up."

"Yes."

She sat with that for a moment. I watched her process it — the way her face went from worried to something harder and more focused. Talia Rossi was loud and warm and fiercely good and underneath all of that was a woman who did not play when it came to the people she loved.

"I'm doing the school run with you today," she said.

"The bakery—"

"Can manage without me for two hours." She stood up. "Done."

I dropped Eli at school at eight forty. Held his hand all the way to the gate. He ran in without looking back — completely certain the world was safe, completely unaware — and I stood there watching the space where he disappeared until Talia touched my elbow.

We walked back without talking.

I opened the workroom at nine. Smiled at customers. Pinned hems. Cut thread. Did everything with steady hands and a level face and the practiced ease of a woman who had spent five years learning how to hold things together on the outside when the inside was a different story entirely.

Talia texted at eleven.

Anything?

Nothing yet.

At noon there was a knock.

Vale North stood at the door holding a container and wearing that navy jacket he wore every single day like a uniform. He was Maplewood Hollow's doctor — warm tan skin, light brown wavy hair always slightly windswept, the unhurried steadiness of a man who had deliberately chosen a quiet life and meant it. He had been carefully, quietly present in my life for two years in a way that asked nothing and offered everything and I had never once asked him to stop.

"You didn't ask for this," he said, holding out the container.

"Talia called you."

"Talia called me." He came in. Set the soup on the table. Looked at me with the careful attention he gave things he was concerned about. "Talk to me."

"Someone was parked outside Eli's school yesterday," I said. "Just watching. Didn't approach anyone."

Vale pulled out the other chair and sat down across from me without being invited. Both elbows on the table. Looking at me straight.

"Do you know who it was?"

"I know who sent him."

"What do you need?"

Not — are you okay. Not — that's terrible. Just — what do you need. Every time, that was what he asked.

"I don't know yet," I said.

He stayed twenty minutes. Didn't fill the silence with things that didn't need saying. When he left I stood at the door watching him cross the main street and thought about the particular cruelty of a good man arriving in your life two years too late to be the thing you needed him to be.

I went back to work.

My phone rang at two fifty.

Fenne.

I grabbed it before the second ring.

"Ivy." Her voice was different. Still controlled but different underneath it. "He's back."

I stood up.

"The car is across the road from the gates again," she said. "But this time he got out."

I was already reaching for my coat.

"He's walking toward the gate," Fenne said. "Ivy, he's not alone. There's another man with him and they're—" She stopped.

"Fenne."

"Ivy, the second man." Her voice dropped. "He's not staff. He doesn't look like staff. He's looking at the children in the yard."

I was already out the door.