Chapter 3

It was an accident, the way she found it.

Grant left his jacket over the back of a kitchen chair Sunday morning, keys and wallet on the counter, and went out for coffee before Reagan even had her eyes fully open. She reached for his phone out of habit, meaning to check the time, before remembering hers was sitting right there in her other pocket the whole time. The screen lit up anyway. One line of preview text, there and gone before the lock screen swallowed it again.

Package secured. Second location confirmed. — M

Nothing about it should have meant anything. People sent cryptic work messages all the time. Grant handled real estate deals that involved code names for properties, confidentiality clauses, all of it dressed up in language that sounded more dramatic than it actually was. She told herself that while she made coffee. She told herself that while she stood at the window and watched the street outside go about its ordinary Sunday morning. She told herself that right up until she moved his jacket off the back of the chair to make room for her own, and something heavy shifted inside the pocket and knocked against the wood with a thud that didn't belong to a wallet or a set of keys.

She stood there for a long moment, staring at the shape of it through the fabric, telling herself to leave it alone. She was a grown woman. She trusted her fiance. She didn't go through his things like some jealous, insecure girlfriend from a bad movie.

She picked it up anyway.

It was a second phone. Cheap, prepaid, the kind sold behind a gas station counter with cash and no questions asked. It wasn't locked. The messages loaded in a single unbroken thread going back three weeks, and Reagan read every line standing perfectly still in her own kitchen, her coffee going cold on the counter, something in her chest turning colder with every word.

Property confirmed as vulnerable target. Proceeding as planned.

Timing needs to move up. She's getting close to him again.

Handle it before Cole gets involved further. My father wants this finished before the vote.

Her hands started shaking so badly the phone nearly slipped out of her grip. She read the messages again, then a third time, searching for some innocent explanation buried in the words, some version of this where none of it meant what it so clearly meant.

There wasn't one.

Her mother's shop hadn't burned by accident, and Grant had known. Not just known. Grant had been part of it, some part she still couldn't fully see the shape of yet, and the man whose name signed off those texts, whoever M was, had been talking about her, about Silas, about a vote that had nothing to do with anything Grant had ever told her about his life.

She heard his key turn in the front lock and shoved the phone back into the jacket pocket so fast the seam nearly tore under her fingers. Her heart slammed against her ribs so hard she was sure he'd be able to hear it from across the room.

"Hey." Grant walked in carrying a paper bag from the coffee shop down the street, his smile easy and familiar, the same smile that used to make her feel like everything in her life had finally settled into place. "You okay? You look pale."

"I'm fine. Just tired." Her voice came out steadier than she had any right to expect. "Long week, that's all."

"You should rest." He crossed the kitchen and kissed her temple, his lips warm against her skin, and for the first time since she'd known him it made her stomach turn instead of settle. "I'll make us something to eat."

She smiled and said something about needing to lie down for a bit, and the moment her bedroom door clicked shut behind her, she pulled out her own phone with fingers that wouldn't stop trembling.

She scrolled to a number she hadn't let herself call in ten years, the same number she'd looked at four days earlier and talked herself out of dialing.

This time she pressed call before she could think better of it.

He picked up on the second ring, like he'd been waiting for it. "Reagan?"

"I need to see you." Her voice cracked, all the composure she'd been holding together for the last four days finally breaking apart at once. "Tonight. It's about the fire, Silas. It's about Grant."

There was a pause on the other end, brief and taut, and when he spoke again his voice had dropped into something low and lethal, something she hadn't heard from him since the night ten years ago when he told her they couldn't be together anymore.

"Where are you. I'm coming now."

"Silas, wait, I don't want you doing anything—"

"Reagan." His voice cut clean through hers, steady, absolute, leaving no room for argument. "Where are you."

She gave him the address to the small coffee shop two blocks from her apartment, the only place she could think of that wasn't her own home, because her own home didn't feel like it belonged to her anymore, not after what she'd just found hiding in a jacket pocket.

She hung up, sat down hard on the edge of her bed, and stared at her hands until she managed to will them still.

Whatever safe, ordinary life she thought she'd built for herself over the last two years, it had just cracked open at the seams, and there was no version of tonight where she managed to close it back up again.

Not now that she knew exactly what had been hiding underneath it all along.

Twenty minutes later she sat in a corner booth with a cup of tea she wasn't drinking, watching the door, her leg bouncing under the table in a rhythm she couldn't make herself stop. The bell above the entrance chimed, and she looked up to find him already scanning the room for her, his jaw set, his eyes carrying a kind of focused intensity that made the other few customers in the shop instinctively look away and mind their own business.

He slid into the booth across from her without asking if he could.

"Tell me everything," he said. "Start from the beginning. Don't leave anything out."

And for the first time in ten years, Reagan realized she trusted this man, the one she'd spent a decade being angry at, more than she trusted the one currently making dinner in her kitchen.