Chapter 4: The Petition

I read the line again. My face stayed still. Twelve hours earlier I’d have been shaking. Now I felt a cold, clean click, like a mind shifting gears.

“Mr. Sterling,” I said pleasantly, “may I see the court order?”

His smile flickered. “This is a petition, Ms. Hale. The hearing is...”

“Then you have no authority to remove me.” I turned a page. “There’s no clerk’s stamp. No case number. The supporting affidavit has no physician’s signature.” I looked at the woman in the coat. “Dr. Reyes. Have you examined me?”

“Not formally,” she said. “I was asked to assess...”

“So you’ve never met me, and you came to a stranger’s door at night with two officers to collect me for a facility.” I let silence do its work. “Priya, are you recording?”

“Since the doorbell.” Priya held up her phone, her voice shaking with fury. “It’s uploading to my cloud.”

The younger officer became fascinated by his shoes.

Sterling recovered fast. “Ms. Hale, no one wants this to be adversarial. A close friend of yours signed a sworn statement.”

“Which friend?”

He consulted a page. “A Ms. Nadia Brandt.”

The floor seemed to tilt.

“She states that last month you confided recurring dreams of a flood, a freeze, and a countdown. That you believed the world would end on a specific date.”

“I never told her that.”

“She says otherwise.”

“I never told anyone.” My voice stayed level, and I hated how steady it was. “I didn’t see that number until six this morning.”

That was the crack, and it was wide enough to drive a truck through. A countdown first glimpsed at 6:12 a.m. could not have been confided last month. Yet the affidavit used the exact figure, ninety, which no one outside my own skull could have supplied.

Unless Nadia could see it too.

“I’m calling my attorney,” I said. “You’ll wait here while I do. If you leave, I’ll assume this petition has no merit.”

Sterling glanced at the officers, then at the doctor, who had gone carefully blank and was already edging backward. “We’ll reschedule.”

“I’m sure you will.”

They left. Dr. Reyes paused at the door and murmured, so only I could hear, “For what it’s worth, you don’t seem delusional. You seem like someone who’s been very careful for a very long time.”

Then she was gone, and Priya slumped against the locked door.

“What was that?”

“A mild trap.” My knees finally felt it, and I sat on the arm of the laundry-covered couch. “They wanted me flagged as unstable before the money moved. A woman with a psychiatric petition on file doesn’t get to sell sixty million in assets.”

“Row. How did they find us?”

“Somebody knew I’d come here.” I looked at her. “Priya, I’m going to tell you something, and you’ll think I’ve lost my mind.”

“Try me.”

So I told her part of it: the vision of the end, the white numbers floating in my eyes. I left out the truck, the boot, and Theo.

When I finished, she walked into the kitchen and came back with a battered notebook. She wrote, in neat capitals: WATER. FUEL. MEDICINE. WALLS.

“I’m a nurse practitioner. I know which medications vanish first when pharmacies close. I’ll make you a list.”

“You believe me?”

“I don’t have to believe the sky is falling.” She said it simply. “I only have to believe you wouldn’t lie to me.”

I put my face in my hands and let myself feel it, the strange, heavy gift of being believed.

My phone buzzed. An unknown number.

Fire stairs. Now. Two men in the lobby. Not police.

Priya read it over my shoulder. “Who is that?”

I knew those blunt capitals. I had read them that morning on a card from a man who knew about the numbers. Whoever he was, he’d been right twice.

“Grab your bag.”

We took six flights of stairs with our hearts slamming against our ribs. On the landing between the third and second floors, a man stepped out of the shadows. A scar cut through his left eyebrow, and his dark coat smelled of rain.

He looked at me for exactly one second. It was the look of a man seeing a ghost, someone who had never expected to see me standing upright and breathing.

“Rowan,” he said, and his voice broke on my name. “You’re not supposed to remember me.”

Boots rang on the stairs above us, heavy and unhurried.

“Who are you?”

“Cole Ward.” He glanced up the stairwell. “I was in the truck when you died.”