Chapter 6

The alley smelled like wet concrete and restaurant grease.

Mia hit the side door at a full run and the August heat wrapped around her like a fist. She didn't slow down. Her duffel bag bounced against her hip, the flash drive was in her pocket, and somewhere above her in that stairwell two officers were knocking on Sarah's door right now and calling her name.

The gray car was exactly where Nathan said it would be—end of the alley, hazard lights blinking orange in the shadow. A man she didn't know stood beside the rear door, holding it open without a word, the way people do when time is the priority and explanations come later.

She got in. The door closed. The car moved.

"Where are we going?" she asked.

"Somewhere safe." The driver didn't look back. "Mr. Hayes said to tell you there's a phone in the seat pocket. Charged and clean. Use it to call whoever you need to warn."

She found the phone. She called Sarah first.

Sarah picked up on the first ring. "Mia—there are two cops at my door right now—"

"I know. Don't lie to them. Tell them the truth—you let me stay, you didn't know about any warrant. That's it. Don't say anything else." Mia kept her voice low and even. "I'm safe. I'll explain everything when I can. I'm sorry, Sarah."

A beat. Then Sarah, steady as bedrock: "Don't apologize. Just don't get arrested."

The car took her to a women's transitional shelter on the east side of Austin—a quiet two-story building with a painted mural on the front wall and a reception desk staffed by a woman named Gloria who looked at Mia's duffel bag and her cracked phone and her wrecked face and did not ask a single unnecessary question.

"Room seven," Gloria said, sliding a key across the counter. "Dinner's at six. You don't have to come down if you're not ready."

Mia took the key. "Thank you."

The room was small. Clean. A single bed, a window with a white curtain, a lamp on a wooden nightstand. It was the most private space she had occupied since the night she'd been driven out of her own house, and the smallness of it—the plainness, the indifference—felt like mercy.

She sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the wall.

The clean phone buzzed. A text from an unsaved number—Nathan's, she understood.

Stay off your personal phone. Don't contact Ethan or Lila. Don't post anything. I'm working on the warrant. Give me 24 hours.

She turned both phones face-down on the nightstand.

She lasted four hours before the walls started to feel too small and her hands started to shake and she couldn't identify a single reason why her lungs were not cooperating with the basic requirement of breathing normally.

She had experienced exactly one panic attack in her life before—the night of her parents' funeral, standing at the kitchen sink doing dishes because she couldn't figure out what else to do with her body. It had felt like dying. Like the air had turned to something thicker than air and her heart had forgotten its rhythm and every thought arrived fractured and half-formed.

This felt the same.

She put her back against the headboard, pressed her knees to her chest, and breathed through it the way the grief counselor had taught her at twenty-three: four counts in, hold, four counts out. She counted the cracks in the ceiling plaster. She named five things she could see. She stayed inside her own body by sheer force of repetition until the shaking slowed and her heart came back down and she was just a woman sitting in a small room, still upright.

She picked up the clean phone and opened the browser.

She typed her own name.

She knew she shouldn't. But knowing and doing have always been two different things.

Ethan had given a short interview to a tech podcast that afternoon—thirty-two minutes recorded, already at eighty thousand views. She found the clip. She pressed play with the volume low and her thumb hovering over the stop button like a detonator.

The host asked about the divorce.

Ethan exhaled. Shook his head slowly. The performance of a man in reluctant pain. "It's not something I want to talk about at length. I'll just say—she wasn't who I thought she was. She made certain choices that I couldn't move forward with. Choices that included—" he paused, precisely long enough, "—faking a pregnancy to try to stop me from leaving."

The host made a sound of sympathetic horror.

"There was no baby," Ethan said. Flat. Certain. "That's all I'll say."

Mia stopped the video.

The room was very quiet. She could hear someone down the hall laughing softly at something on TV, and outside a car alarm went off and then went silent, and the white curtain moved in the draft from the window unit.

She pressed the heel of her palm to her sternum and pushed. Hard. Like she could hold the thing in her chest together from the outside.

No baby.

She had bled out alone on a parking lot asphalt floor and he was on a podcast calling it a performance.

She did not cry. She had cried enough this week to last a year and she was rationing what was left.

Instead she picked up her notes app—the four pages she had written at three in the morning—and she added a new line at the bottom.

He told eighty thousand people there was no baby. Timestamp: 4:47 p.m. Source: The Build Podcast, Episode 214.

Evidence was evidence.

Even when it was being used against you, it was still evidence. And someday—soon—she was going to need every single timestamp she could find.