Chapter Twenty Two

Adam's POV

He had built a company from nothing and a reputation on precision, and the thing that undid him in the lobby was not Jules's anger — he had expected that, had been braced for it from the moment the front desk called up — but the single detail she said when she handed him the papers.

Two weeks ago.

He had turned that date over in his mind the whole time Cooper was running the filing records. Two weeks ago, he had not known Eli existed. Two weeks ago, he had been in another city entirely, signing off on an acquisition that had nothing to do with Millhaven or Jules or a small boy in rocket pajamas. Two weeks ago, the only people who had known both that Jules was in Millhaven and that she had a child who might be his were the people Cooper had told, and Cooper had told no one, and Elena.

Elena, who had clearly been watching longer than he had understood.

He called Cooper from the window while Jules stood behind him in the lobby radiating a very controlled, very quiet kind of devastation, and Cooper confirmed the forgery in eleven minutes. Marcus Veil. Elena's lawyer. A forged authorization with Adam's signature — good work, professional, close enough to fool a clerk but not close enough to fool a forensic examiner. Cooper had both the file and the original authorization template they had used within the same day.

"She's building a case file against herself at this point," Cooper said, and there was a flatness in it that was not satisfaction, just tired resignation.

"Make sure it's airtight," Adam said. "Everything. Every thread."

"I've been building it for three years," Cooper said. "I just needed you to be ready to use it."

Adam had no good answer to that.

* * *

Jules left the hotel with the papers under her arm and the particular walk of someone who had been frightened badly and was covering it with forward motion. He watched her go through the lobby doors and stood at the window until her car pulled out onto the street.

Then he went back upstairs and called his legal team.

The call took forty minutes. When it was done, the fraudulent custody petition had been flagged for withdrawal, Marcus Veil had been contacted and informed — tersely, legally, with Cooper's file attached — that his involvement had been documented, and a motion had been prepared to have the case dismissed before it could develop a breath of momentum in any court. His team was very good at this kind of thing. He paid them enough to be very good at this kind of thing.

He stood at the window of his hotel room afterward and looked out at Millhaven going about its ordinary afternoon — people on the street, a bus, a woman on a bicycle — and he thought about Elena.

He thought about the photographs she had helped deploy, using Henry's obsession as a weapon. He thought about the fire, the paid witness, the arson charges that had stuck to Jules long enough to send her to a holding cell while pregnant and alone. He thought about three years of Jules carrying Eli without him, raising him without him, building a life in a city she'd chosen with her eyes closed on a map because she had no one to go toward.

He thought about what it meant to be responsible for that. Not entirely — Henry had been his own particular rot, the photographs had been Henry's invention — but Elena had organized it. Elena had timed it. Elena had ensured that when Jules arrived at his door, he was already primed to believe the worst of her.

And he had believed it.

That was the thing he could not give to Elena, the part that was entirely his own. He had believed it without question, without asking, without a single conversation in which he'd looked at Jules's face and tried to determine what was true. He had believed a dead man's manufactured evidence over twelve years of knowing what it felt like to be near someone real.

He sat on the edge of the hotel bed and he called his mother's name out loud in the empty room. Not expecting anything. Just needing to say it to someone. His mother, who had spent twenty years cataloging the artifacts of other people's lives and had always said: the only thing a fake has that a real thing doesn't is the confidence of the person selling it.

He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.

Then he stood up, picked up his phone, and texted Jules.

The filing is being withdrawn today. Cooper has everything. You won't see more papers.  I'm sorry that you had to see those ones.

He put the phone down. He went to the window. He thought about the day he'd walked Eli home, the easy grip of a small hand, the commentary about the stairs, the monstrous cat drawing the boy had pointed to on the second landing with a proprietary air. The way Eli had fallen asleep on his shoulder at the baseball game and he had sat in the stadium noise and not moved, not even when his arm went numb, because he was afraid if he shifted, the boy would wake up and it would be over.

He thought about what he was going to do with all of this.

He thought about Jules's voice through his car window three years ago, the last thing she'd said before his building's door: Goodbye, Adam. Forever.

He thought about the word forever and how it had not, apparently, meant what either of them had intended.

His phone buzzed. Cooper again.

Sal has been confirmed. Elena used him for the original fire. He's still in her contact list. She called him two days ago.

Adam read it twice.

He typed back: Security on the apartment. Today. Don't leave it without someone on the building.

Cooper: Already done. I assigned someone this morning.

Adam stood in his hotel room for a long time after, thinking about the specific, organized malice of a person who had already burned a house down once and was two days out from calling the man who'd helped her do it.

He thought about Jules's voice in the lobby. I am running out of cities to hide in.

He picked up his coat. He went downstairs. He drove to the east side of Millhaven and parked outside an older building with slightly crooked floors and a buzzer panel with seven names on it.

He did not press the buzzer.

He sat in his car outside for twenty minutes until the lights in apartment seven went on — warm, yellow, the shadow of someone moving in the kitchen — and he felt, for the first time in a very long time, that he was where he was supposed to be.

Then he drove back to his hotel.

He would start with being trustworthy. That seemed like the right place.