ВойтиCHAPTER FIFTY ONE: AT THE BEACH Nicole's POV —The morning of the fifth day I finally slept without the nightmares.I knew it was five days because I had been marking them the way you marked things when the days had stopped having their usual distinguishing features, by the light through the window and the sound of the water and the specific quality of hunger that arrived at roughly the same hour each morning regardless of whether I had eaten properly the day before.I hadn't been eating properly.I knew that the way I knew most things about myself that I wasn't doing anything about, clearly and without particular urgency, the way you knew a tap was dripping but the kitchen was far away and the bed was where you were.The room had developed a shape around me.Not comfortable exactly, but familiar in the way that any space became familiar after five days of sleeping and not sleeping and sitting against the wall and watching the water through the window do its constant unbothered thing.
Flether's POVI was in the study at eleven at night when the tracker found her.Not because I had been watching it. I had the app open in the background the way you kept a window open in a room you weren't in, just in case, and I was going through the Harrington legal response with my reading glasses on and a cold cup of coffee beside me when the notification pushed everything off the screen.Device active. Location acquired.I took my glasses off.I looked
Fletcher's POVThe doctor came out at two fourteen.I stood up from the chair before she reached me and she held up one hand, the small gesture of someone who had learned that the fastest way to calm a parent was to get to the good news before they could catastrophise into the gap."The fever broke twenty minutes ago," she said. "Her temperature is coming down steadily. We want to keep her overnight for observation but the numbers are moving in the right direction."
Fletcher's POVLoise's fever broke at two in the morning.I was in the chair beside her bed when it happened, watching the monitor the way she had watched it for Nicole, counting the numbers with the focused attention of someone who had decided that counting was the thing they could do and was doing it completely. When the numbers shifted and the nurse came in and checked and looked at me with the expression that meant: we're moving in the right direction, I sat back in the chair and felt something in my chest release that I hadn't fully registered was being held.She was going to be fine.
Fletcher's POVShe had been quiet all day.Not her usual quiet, not the focused inward quiet of a child who was working through something in her head and would surface when she was ready. A different kind. The kind that had a temperature underneath it, that made her movements slower and her eyes less sharp and her drawing pad stay closed on the table beside her untouched from after breakfast until I noticed at three in the afternoon that she hadn't opened it once.I crouched beside her chair.
The room cost sixty dollars a night and had a window that faced the water.That was why I chose it. Not the price, not the distance from the city, not the fact that the woman at the front desk had asked no questions and handed me a key with the indifferent efficiency of someone who had seen enough people arrive at odd hours with one bag to have stopped wondering about the stories. The window. The water outside it, grey and constant and entirely unbothered by anything happening on the shore, and I needed something unbothered near me for a while.I had been here four days.My mother knew I was here. I had called her from the car on the way and
Daddy. What are you thinking so deeply about? Am I a burden to you?"The words hit me like bullets to the chest. Ten years old and she's asking me if she's a burden. Christ, what kind of father does that make me?I stared down at her pale face, those enormous eyes that seemed to see too much, know
She doesn't see him until dinner that night. But before then, something happens that shifts everything.Nicole arrives home earlier than usual, her mind still replaying the morning's encounter with Xavier. The memory of his hands on her waist, the electricity that had coursed through her when he pr
Nicole bent over her desk, squinting at the financial reports scattered across the mahogany surface. The numbers blurred together after hours of reviewing quarterly projections, and she rubbed her temples, feeling the familiar tension headache building behind her eyes. The afternoon sun streamed th
Two Hours After the Police LeftXavier sat alone in his office as twilight painted the windows in shades of amber and deep purple. The space felt hollow now, every familiar object tainted by the revelation of Christina's deception. His fingers traced the edge of his desk where she had leaned just d







