ログインSebastian's POV The telephone rang at ten past nine, nine days after I flew home from her door, and a man I had never heard of asked whether I could see him that afternoon."Who is this?""Halloway. It would mean nothing to you." His voice was dry and unhurried, with a rasp in it like paper dragged across a table. "Your name is on a court filing I have read four times. I would like to sell you something, and I would like to do it before I lose my nerve.""Sell me what?""There's a café under the departures board at the central station. Three o'clock. I'll be the one in a raincoat who would rather be anywhere else."He rang off before I could answer. I stood at the window with the receiver in my hand and heard Ana's voice in a yellow kitchen. Whatever you can prove. In writing. Then nothing else.A stranger with something to sell wasn't a visit. So I cleared my afternoon.°°°°°°°°°°He was easy to find. A raincoat the colour of wet pavement, steam lifting off its shoulders, a grey m
Caspian's POV The fourth-floor landing smelled of wet wool and old paint, and a single yellow bulb hummed above a door I had never stood in front of.I had climbed four flights without thinking about it. My knuckles were an inch from the wood when the spyhole went dark. The chain rattled, and the door opened a hand's width on a grey jumper with the sleeves shoved past the elbows.She wasn't surprised. Her eyes went over my shoulder to the stairwell window, where the street lay black and wet and the curb stood empty, and a muscle moved in her jaw."Was he in here?" I asked.She stepped out and pulled the door shut behind her. "A man sat in a car outside this building every night since August," she said, very low. "Tonight the curb is empty and you're on my landing. Ask me again about my visitors.""That is not an answer.""It's the only one you've earned."I put my hand flat on the frame beside her head. She looked at it, then at me, and didn't move."Forty-one minutes," I said. "Yo
Caspian's POV I waited three days for a man who hums to find his nerve, and on Wednesday morning I stopped waiting.Pryce's office was on the third floor, at the end of a corridor of grey carpet and unmarked doors. It held a desk, a fern, a kettle on a filing cabinet, and a wall calendar with every past day crossed through in pencil. I sat in his chair at ten to eight with my coat on and the door shut. When the handle turned at five past, he took two steps inside and stopped with a paper bag in his hand."Mr. Strauss.""Sit down." I nodded towards the visitor's chair. "You rang me at a traffic light on Sunday. Finish it."He sat. The bag stayed on his knee. Three notes of a tune escaped him, and he caught them and swallowed them."I want to say first that I haven't done anything improper.""I haven't said you did.""No. People usually do, once they're sitting where you are." He tried a smile and put it away. "It came through the family office. A written instruction, two years ago, o
Ana's POV I had rejected one car already. It had come on Sunday at eleven, a black sedan with a driver in a suit, and it had waited with its engine running for forty minutes. I looked at it for the first ten. Then I turned my back on the glass and read a paperback I didn't take in for the other thirty.I hadn't rejected it because Caspian asked me to. I had rejected it because I was done being sent for by people with that surname.In the morning I paid the records fee on the subject access request I had filed the day after I resigned, and the payment page made me look at my balance, which I had spent a week not doing. There was no salary coming. What was left of my own money would last a few weeks. Past that was fifty thousand dollars I would sooner starve than touch. Emily refused rent, so I had started buying the groceries without being asked, the only way I knew to pay for anything. A recruiter's email sat unanswered in my inbox, because answering it meant admitting I needed i
Ana's POV The knock came at twenty past nine, three raps, evenly spaced, and I knew before I stood up that it wasn't Emily.Emily was at her sister's for the night, and she never knocked at her own door. I crossed the living room in my socks, careful of the loose board by the fridge, and put my eye to the spyhole.To my surprise, Sebastian was standing on the landing under the bad yellow bulb with a folder under his arm and rain on his shoulders.I rested my forehead against the cool wood and counted to five. Then I set the chain and opened the door the width of it."Ana." He said it quietly, as if testing whether it was still allowed. "I know I shouldn't be here. I flew in this afternoon and I should have phoned, but I thought if I phoned...""You've got about nine seconds.""I have something you need to see. I wrote it all down on the plane, and it was clear then." He looked at the folder, shifted it to his other arm, and looked at me again. "It starts with Nicole. No. It starts w
Sebastian's POV Three cardboard boxes arrived at Paul Garrity's office on a Thursday morning, and the courier made me sign for each one separately."Fraud disclosure is wide," Garrity said, setting the last box beside the others. The water glass on his desk shivered. "If you want to read it yourself, clear two days.""I'll take a day and a half.""You'll take two. Nobody reads a woman's whole financial life in a day and a half." He nodded towards the conference table by the window. "Pencils are in the drawer. I'll send coffee."Taking off my jacket, I folded it over a chair. For years other people had read documents for me, and I had signed what they put in front of me. I slit the first box with a letter opener and started.Nicole's life came out on paper. Bank statements bound in clips. Receipts for dresses and dinners and a spa I had never heard of. Travel confirmations printed on thin sheets that curled at the edges. I read the way I used to read a merger, front to back, a penc
Ana's POV I had been at my desk twenty minutes when HR walked in and shut the door behind her."Settling in?" she asked, but her eyes were doing something her smile wasn't."It's going as planned." I kept my voice light. "The launch timeline holds. I'll have the full rollout deck ready by Friday."
Caspian’s POV I knew her the second I walked through that door.I had told myself I wouldn't. I had told myself a man doesn't remember one face out of a crowded club, one night out of a hundred forgettable nights, one woman he left before the sun came up. I had told myself a lot of things on the f
Ana's POV I looked at the floor he wanted me to kneel on.Then I looked at my husband, sitting there so sure of himself, and I almost laughed."No," I said.His smile slipped. "Ana.""I will never kneel to her." My voice was steady now. The shaking was gone, burned clean out of me. "Keep your sign
Ana's POV I didn't leave the bedroom for three days.The curtains stayed closed. The phone stayed face down. I laid on top of the covers in the same robe and stared at the light on the ceiling, morning into evening into morning again.Sebastian didn't come home.Why would he? He had somewhere bett







