LOGINZara's POV I found out through a conversation I wasn't supposed to overhear. I had been at the printer when two people at the adjacent workstation discussed, that Alex Voss had cleared his schedule for few days and that the car had left the house that morning. I set the printed pages down. Stood very still for a moment. Then I went to my office and called Mason. "They're leaving town," I said when he answered. "I know," he said. The two words landed.... "You already know," I said "Since this, morning," he said. I held the phone "We should follow them," I said. "Before they disappear somewhere we can't reach them. If they spend these days alone together...." "Zara" His voice. The flat, unhurried version that preceded the thing he had already decided. "You still don't understand, do you?" he said. "What does that mean?" "It means you don't need to chase them." I pressed my hand against the desk "If we don't go after them," I said, "how is any of this supposed to work
Maya's POV The suitcase had been open on the bed for forty minutes. Not because I didn't know what to pack.... packing was not the problem. The problem was the notebook on the side table, which I kept looking at in the way you looked at things you were trying to convince yourself to leave behind and couldn't quite manage. Reeves had everything he needed. Carter was recovering and his file was with the right people. Everything that could be in motion was in motion. Nothing I did in the next few weeks would accelerate it. I told myself this. I continued looking at the notebook. Alex came in carrying the smaller travel bag. He took one look at me and then at the direction of my gaze and his expression did the thing it did when he was finding something genuinely amusing and was not going to pretend otherwise. "You've been looking at that notebook for ten minutes," he said. "I'm not," I said. "You have," he said. "I timed it" I looked at him. "You timed it."
Alex's POV I found her on the balcony.... The notebook in her lap. Her eyes somewhere beyond the garden.... I had been watching her do this for two days. I brought two cups of coffee... Set hers beside the chair before I sat. She looked at the cup. Then at me... "You shouldn't be up this early in the morning," she said. "I've been asleep for two months," I said. "I have a surplus" She looked at the garden. Almost smiled. Not quite. I reached across. Took the notebook from her hands. Closed it. She let me take it... I set it on the table between us. "You need a break," I said. She looked at me. The faint smile arrived... the tired version, the one that communicated something was genuinely registering beneath the exhaustion. "A break from what?" she said. "My life?" "A break from carrying the weight of the whole world," I said. She lowered her eyes Her hand moving to her stomach in the automatic gesture I had been watching her make since I woke up...
Selina's POVI had been managing people my entire adult life. I had done it in boardrooms and dinner parties and hospital corridors and across kitchen tables at midnight. I had done it so consistently and for so long that the mechanism had become invisible to me, the way your own breathing became invisible... present, operating, so automatic that you stopped being aware of it.The holding facility did not respond to any of the instruments I had been using.This was the thing I had not been prepared forNot the discomfort.... discomfort I could manage, had managed, had filed under temporary and therefore irrelevant. Not the loss of privacy, not the food, not the institutional quality of a space that had been designed for function rather than dignity.The management didn't work hereThe women in this facility had not agreed to be managedThe food line moved slowly.I had learned the rhythm of it across three days.... the sequence, the pace, the geography of who stood wher
Zara's POV I had not slept. Not from guilt, I had moved past guilt approximately three days ago, in the car outside the café.... I had not slept because I had been working. I walked into Mason's office without knocking. Not from aggression.... from the understanding that knocking communicated uncertainty about whether I had the right to be there, and I had decided, overnight, that performing uncertainty was no longer available to me. He was at his desk. Documents spread across it in the organised way of someone who had been working for an hour or more.... He looked up. Not with surprise. "You've been lying to me," I said. I closed the door behind me. He looked at me for a moment. "Have I?"His eye turned back to his desk. "You told me we were partners," I said. "You're making plans you haven't told me about. Bringing people in you haven't mentioned." I held his gaze. "The woman at the café. Who is she?" He smiled. The small version. The one that communicat
Maya's POVAlex had insisted on the table.Not the kitchen table.... the dining room, which had the space to spread things out properly, to lay the documents alongside the photographs alongside the notebooks in the sequence that made the connections visible rather than keeping everything stacked in the box where the connections were invisible.He had been out of the hospital for two days.He moved carefully, the way people moved when they were aware of something healing and were choosing not to test it. But he was at the table. I had not told him he should be resting.He would have listened politely and continued reading."The handwriting changes here," he said.He turned the notebook so I could see where he was pointing... this page, the specific line where the organised shorthand broke into the faster, less controlled version."I noticed that too," I said. "When he understood he was being watched."Alex looked at the pageAt the words my father had written when he
Maya’s POVThe coordination suite felt smaller with just the two of us in it. The harbor glittered beyond the glass like it was mocking us both, endless, indifferent, moving on without caring who drowned.Selina didn’t bother with the soft, apologetic mask anymore. The moment Lila’s footsteps faded
Maya’s POVThe alarm screamed at 6:00 a.m. sharp, a shrill, unforgiving sound that drilled straight into my skull“Damn it,” I hissed, slapping the phone silent before it could cycle into its second round. My head throbbed part hangover from too much crying, part exhaustion from staring at the ceil
Maya’s POVI stayed until the last possible minute.Not because there was work left. Because I needed time to rebuild the mask.By the time I stepped into the executive hallway leading to the private parking garage, my heels clicked with deliberate calm. My makeup was fresh, concealer over the red
Maya’s POV“She is two months pregnant.”“I can’t believe it,” Mason’s voice carried through the cracked boardroom door, low and reverent, the way he used to speak to me only in our earliest days before the miscarriages, before the silence grew between us like frost on glass. “Two months?”My fing







