Chapter 3: Anything That Comes Near You

Nathan asked surprisingly little of Audrey before they left.

Her usual sedan disappeared from the morning plan. The front entrance was no longer being used. Two members of the household security team were reassigned, and a second vehicle would leave several minutes before hers.

None of those decisions were presented to Audrey one by one.

By the time she returned upstairs, changed into a cream blouse and dark tailored trousers, and gathered the documents for the board meeting, the arrangements had already been made around her. Staff moved with greater purpose than usual, but no one crowded her with explanations. Nathan had apparently decided that protecting her did not require making her participate in every conversation about how it would be done.

She found that unexpectedly tolerable.

At nine ten, Claire Bennett met her outside the study with a tablet in one hand and concern she was trying unsuccessfully to hide.

Claire had worked with Audrey long enough to know better than to ask whether she was fine when the answer was obvious.

Instead, she summarized the morning’s changes as they walked toward the service stairs. The board meeting remained at ten. Two directors would join remotely. The foundation meeting had been moved from a restaurant to a private conference room at Sterling headquarters. Lunch would be brought in.

“The lunch change wasn’t mine,” Claire added.

Audrey glanced ahead.

Nathan was already at the bottom of the stairs, speaking quietly into an earpiece.

“I guessed.”

“You hate people rearranging your schedule.”

“I hate people rearranging it without a reason.”

“And he has one?”

Audrey thought of the photograph again.

“Yes.”

That was all she said.

They did not use the main garage.

Nathan led the small group through an interior passage Audrey had walked through perhaps twice in her life, into a lower service level normally used by maintenance staff and deliveries. A black SUV waited near a concrete pillar with its engine running. Another vehicle was already gone.

Nathan checked the rear compartment himself before opening the door for her.

Audrey stopped beside him.

“Do you inspect every car before I get into it?”

“If I’m doing my job properly.”

“And if you’re not?”

“You’ll have a different bodyguard.”

There was no arrogance in the answer. It was simply a statement of the standard he expected of himself.

Audrey got in.

Nathan did not take the front passenger seat. He entered from the opposite side and sat in the rear with enough distance between them that she did not feel crowded.

The SUV moved out of the garage without ceremony.

For the first several minutes, Nathan said nothing.

He watched the side mirror, the traffic behind them, the vehicles that stayed in the same lane too long. Once, when a motorcycle came up quickly on the right, his attention sharpened before relaxing again when it passed.

Audrey pretended to read the papers on her lap.

After a while, she stopped pretending.

“You do realize staring out the window like that is making me more aware that someone might be following us.”

Nathan kept his gaze outside.

“That will wear off.”

“Comforting.”

“I’m not trying to make you comfortable. I’m trying to make you safe without making your life smaller than it has to be. Those are different things.”

That answer disarmed her more effectively than reassurance would have.

The car turned onto a broader avenue. Morning traffic thickened around them, yellow cabs and delivery vans filling the lanes between glass towers. Nothing looked different from the thousands of mornings Audrey had crossed Manhattan before.

That was what bothered her most.

The threat had not changed the city. It had changed the way she saw it.

A parked car was no longer just a parked car. A man standing too long beside a building entrance became someone worth noticing. Reflections in dark windows suggested movement where there might be none.

Nathan seemed to notice all of it without appearing tense.

Audrey watched him for another moment.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“You’ve barely looked at me since you arrived.”

Nathan finally turned his head.

“Looking at you isn’t my job.”

“Then what is?”

The answer did not come immediately.

The SUV slowed at an intersection. Nathan’s attention shifted past her shoulder to a delivery truck pulling alongside them, then to the pedestrian crossing ahead. Only when the light changed and the truck moved on did he look back toward the window.

“Anything that comes near you.”

That ended the conversation.

Strange man, Audrey thought.

Unsociable. Probably inflexible. Almost impossible to read.

Yet when the SUV finally turned toward the Sterling Group headquarters, Audrey realized something she had not noticed until then.

She had spent the entire drive with her back against the seat.

She had not checked behind her once.