Chapter Twenty-eight: Low Flame

Morning slid into afternoon, then into the blue weight of evening, the hours measured not by clocks but by the rhythm of small rituals: meds, water, food, checks. Anna’s world shrank to the radius of the couch, the bathroom, the stubborn walks to the kitchen and back. Ethan’s world looped the perimeter, every circuit returning to her without looking like it had.

The lull wasn’t peace. It was pressure condensed into a steady weight—bearable only because they carried it together.

Between takeout meals, calls from his office and conversations that weren’t confessions, they worked.

The coffee table became a war table. Laptop open, maps tiled on the screen. Post-its like flags. A legal pad marked by Ethan’s jagged print—names, arrows, fragments. She saw the courtroom in him when he laid it out, the way he built a case from rot and motive.

“You organize people like evidence,” she said at last, tracing one of his arrows with a dull pencil.

“Every name’s a liability,” he said. “Proof comes af