Chapter Ten

By noon, Ashford Biotech has a statement out.

I watch it on the kitchen television with my mother, who has the sound turned up over the caterer's sample menu spread across the counter, and there's Julian's father on screen, gray-suited and calm, using words like isolated and fully contained and no risk to the broader public with the specific practiced smoothness of a man who has said sentences like this before and expects to say them again.

"Terrible," my mother says, not looking up from the menu. "Can you imagine, some kind of contamination at Mercy General. Good thing the Ashfords caught it so quickly."

I don't say anything. I watch Marcus Ashford's face on the screen, perfectly composed, and I think about a man's hand tearing a restraint rail like paper, and I think about six new patients in twenty minutes, and I understand that whatever "contained" means to the people writing that statement, it does not mean what my mother thinks it means.

My phone buzzes under the counter, out of her sightline. Reyna.

Six became eleven by the time I left this morning. Then it stopped. No new cases since eight a.m. Either they got very lucky, or somebody's making sure new cases don't get counted as new cases anymore.

I know which one it is. I don't type that back.

I still owe you the truth, I write instead. Tonight. I promise.

You said that yesterday.

I know. Tonight. I need you somewhere safe first, and I need to make sure telling you doesn't put you in more danger than you're already in.

The three dots appear and disappear twice before her reply comes through. Fine. Tonight. And Ivy — thank you for getting me out this morning. I don't think I said that yet.

*

"Cream or ivory," my mother says, holding up two identical-looking swatches of fabric, and I have to physically pull my attention back into the kitchen, back into a conversation about tablecloths happening in a world where I watched a man's restraints tear apart six hours ago.

"Ivory," I say, because it doesn't matter, because none of this matters in the shape it's being presented to me.

"You've been distracted all week." She sets the swatches down, studying me with the particular attention she reserves for moments she's decided are important. "Is everything all right with Julian? You two seemed off at dinner."

"Everything's fine."

"Ivy."

"It's fine, Mom." I make myself smile, the old smile, the one I wore for a year before I ever understood what it was costing me. "Wedding nerves. That's all."

She accepts it, because she wants to accept it, because a daughter with wedding nerves is a far more comfortable thing to worry about than whatever's actually sitting behind my eyes, and she goes back to the swatches, and I go back to pretending the biggest problem in this kitchen is the color of a tablecloth.

I'm halfway through pretending to care about centerpiece heights when the doorbell rings.

I don't think anything of it until I hear our housekeeper's voice in the front hall, uncertain, and then a man's voice underneath it, low and fast and clearly agitated, and something cold moves through me half a second before I place why.

I get to the front hall in time to see him — disheveled, tie loosened, eyes red-rimmed like he hasn't slept, standing just inside our front door with our housekeeper backing away from him like she's not sure whether to be worried or afraid.

I've never met him. I don't need to. I recognize him from the way Damian said his name in the car this morning, careful, weighted, a man he's spent eight months protecting.

"I need to speak with Celeste," Tobias says, and his voice cracks on her name in a way that tells me whatever's happened since this morning, it's gotten very bad very fast. "Please. I know this is insane, showing up here, I know that, but I don't have anywhere else to go, and I think — I think they know. About both of us. I think Marcus already knows."

Behind me, I hear my mother's footsteps in the hallway, coming to see what the commotion is, and upstairs, a door opens, and I know without turning around that it's Celeste, drawn out of her room by a voice she never in a thousand years expected to hear inside this house.

Tobias sees her on the stairs before I do. I watch his whole body go rigid with relief and terror at once, watch him take a step toward the staircase like he's forgotten anyone else is standing in the hall at all.

"Celeste," he says. "They know. Marcus knows everything. You need to run."