Chapter 204: Helen's POV

The house was too quiet. The kind of silence that wasn’t peace, but pressure. The kids had been dropped off at Rita’s for the afternoon, and I should have used the empty hours to focus on the files sprawled across my dining table.

The ones with Rose’s name scrawled and underlined in red, the clippings, the receipts, the little scraps of “proof” I’d been collecting like a detective losing her mind.

But I hadn’t been reading. I’d just been staring.

My eyes kept returning to a single word written on the corner of one page: Jack. The name felt like it burned even from ink. It had taken me weeks to even write it down, to admit what my gut already knew.

And now that it was there, I couldn’t look away.

The knock at the door startled me so hard that my pen rolled off the table and hit the floor.

I froze, breath caught in my throat. For a half-second I thought it was him. But when I looked through the frosted glass, the silhouette was broader, the posture less predatory.

Familiar.

Riley.

I