Chapter Five

Victor Sinclair did not like surprises.

He sat at the long table in his house on the north side of the city. The table was made for twelve people. He always ate alone. In front of him was a plate of food he had not touched. Beside the plate was a stack of paper.

Sophia Bennett sat two chairs away. Nobody had asked her to sit. She sat anyway.

"Read the last pages first," she said. "Those are the ones that matter."

Victor did not answer. He turned the pages himself, one at a time. He read slowly. He had built a company by reading slowly.

The handwriting was small and neat. A girl's handwriting. The kind of writing that stayed inside the lines because someone taught her to be careful.

He stopped on a page near the end.

Sometimes I think about what happens after the contract. I will be twenty four. I will have no husband and no job I love and no story I can tell anyone. But I will have my name back. That is something. That has to be something.

Victor put the page down.

"She is not stupid," he said.

Sophia smiled. "She is a bookkeeper."

"Yes," Victor said. "That is what I mean."

Sophia did not understand. She kept smiling anyway.

Victor pushed the stack away from him. "Where did you get this?"

"Her apartment."

"Before or after my son's people went in?"

Sophia's smile moved a little. "Before."

Victor nodded once. He appreciated speed. He did not appreciate her.

"And the pregnancy," he said. "You are certain."

"Her mother bought a test. Her mother bought vitamins. She is careful, but her mother is not."

Victor looked at the window. Outside, the garden was cut into straight lines. He paid three men to keep it that way.

Thirty years ago he had built the Sinclair name out of nothing but nerve and other people's mistakes. Now his son had gone quiet for two weeks. Now there was a girl from a broken family somewhere in the country with a Sinclair child inside her.

The press would love it. The board would not.

"Mr. Sinclair?" Sophia said.

"You want something," Victor said. "Say it."

Sophia leaned forward. "I want Mark back."

Victor laughed. It was a short sound with nothing warm in it. "You want the name. That is fine. That is honest. But do not tell me it is love. I have no use for that."

Sophia's face went red. She said nothing.

Victor stood up. He was seventy one years old, and he still stood like a younger man. "The contract ends in three months," he said. "Before it ends, that girl signs the divorce. Quietly. She takes money. She goes somewhere far. There is no baby in any newspaper. There is no Hart in my family tree."

"And if she says no?"

"Everyone says no first," Victor said.

He walked out of the room without touching his food.

In the hall, he called for his own man. Not Daniel. Daniel belonged to Mark now, and Victor had noticed.

"Find the girl," Victor said. "Before my son does."

Across the city, Mark was reading too.

He had not left the study since morning. The diary sat closed on the desk. He had read it three times, and he could not read it again. Instead, he was reading a courier receipt.

"Millfield," Daniel said. "The letter she got was posted from a town called Millfield. Three hours south. The courier office keeps paper records because the owner does not trust computers."

Mark stood up so fast the chair moved behind him. "Millfield."

"There is more, sir. A woman is renting a room above a bakery there. Pays cash every week. Gave the name Liv."

The room went very quiet.

"Liv," Mark said.

"Yes, sir."

Mark put his hand flat on the desk. He needed something solid. Three weeks of maps and pins and dead ends, and it was a bakery and a woman who paid cash.

"Get the car," he said.

"Sir, it is nine at night."

"Get the car."

Daniel did not move. "Sir. If we go in tonight with three vehicles and men in suits, she will run again. She ran from the station. She jumped out of a motel window."

Mark looked at him.

"She jumped out of a window," Daniel said again, quieter. "To get away from us."

Mark closed his eyes. He saw the woman on the stairs in the footage. The hood. The way she held her arms around herself.

"Then I go alone," he said. "In the morning."

"Yes, sir."

Mark sat back down. He put his hand on the diary and left it there for a long time.

In Millfield, Olivia was not sleeping.

The bag was packed by the door. It had been packed since the letter came. She had washed her two dresses in the sink and folded them while they were still damp because she could not sit still.

The letter was on the table. She had not been able to throw it away. She read it once more in the dark.

We know who you are, Mrs. Sinclair.

Not Olivia. Not Liv. Mrs. Sinclair. The name followed her three hours down the road and up a set of wooden stairs into a room that smelled like bread.

She put her hand on her stomach. There was nothing to feel yet. She talked to it anyway.

"I know," she said. "I know. We just got here."

The floor creaked below her. The landlady, Mrs. Pratt, went to bed at ten and got up at four to start the ovens. Olivia had learned the sound of that woman's whole day through the floorboards.

She had liked it here. That was the worst part. She had liked packing bread and wiping tables and hearing her fake name called across a warm room.

She wrote a note and left it on the bed with two weeks of rent.

Thank you for not asking me anything. I am sorry to go like this.

She did not sign it. She was getting good at not signing things.

At four in the morning, the ovens came on. Olivia went down the back stairs with her bag while the whole building smelled like the only home she had made for herself.

The street was black and cold. The bus to Ashgrove left at four thirty.

She walked fast. Her breath went white in front of her.

Behind her, a car was parked at the end of the street with two men inside it. They had arrived at midnight. They worked for Victor Sinclair, and they had been told to watch, not to touch.

One of them lifted his phone.

"She is moving," he said.

Olivia did not look back. She had learned not to look back.

Four hours later, Mark Sinclair drove into Millfield with the sun rising behind him and no idea he was already too late.