Chapter 2

"I think you have the wrong person," I said.

"No, Miss Voss." Harlan's voice didn't waver. Not even slightly. "We have the right person."

The wind off the river moved through me again. I pressed my free hand flat against the pharmacy wall and felt the cold of it climb my palm.

"How do you know my name?"

"You're currently employed as a contract analyst at Meridian Consulting. You live at Fourteen Wren Court, apartment 3C. You've been with Elliot Caine for approximately two years." A pause. "Give or take."

I said nothing.

"Miss Voss?"

"I heard you." I stood up from the wall. Somewhere down the block a car alarm started and stopped. "How do you know those things?"

"The family is thorough."

"That's not an answer."

"No," he agreed. "It isn't."

I should have hung up. I know that now — the way you know things afterward, in the clean, unhelpful light of hindsight. Instead I stood on the pavement in a cream dress with the river wind in my hair and I kept listening, which probably told Harlan everything he needed to know about the kind of night I was having.

He explained it simply. The Ashford family needed someone to stay with their heir. Daily presence. Assistance with personal routines. Reading, conversation, the small dignities of a bedridden man that a rotating medical team couldn't adequately provide.

"There are caregiving agencies," I said. "Professional ones."

"Yes."

"So why not use them?"

A beat. "Because Mr. Ashford doesn't want one."

I turned that over. A man incapacitated enough to need round-the-clock care, specific enough about that care to rule out professionals. Something about it felt wrong in a way I couldn't immediately locate.

"What's his name?" I said.

"Adrian Ashford."

I knew the name the way you know the names of weather systems — from a distance, as something that affected other people's lives. The Ashfords owned half the commercial real estate in Velmoor's financial district and the other half of everything else. Their charitable foundation had its name on the cancer wing at Velmoor General. Adrian specifically I knew from a single business column I'd skimmed eighteen months ago — youngest director in Ashford Group history, some quote about the company's expansion into European logistics, a photograph of a man who looked like he'd never once been uncertain about a room he'd walked into.

"Why would someone like Adrian Ashford need me?"

"That," Harlan said, "is something Mr. Ashford would prefer to explain himself."

I caught it immediately. "He's incapacitated. How exactly does he explain anything himself?"

Harlan didn't answer.

"I'm not interested," I said. "Whatever this is, I'm not the right person. Tonight has been—" I stopped. Pressed my fingers to my temple. "I'm not interested."

"Of course." No pressure in his voice. Nothing that pushed. "You can reach me at this number if that changes." He recited it once, unhurried. Then: "You may want to hear the compensation before you decide."

I almost said it didn't matter.

He told me the number anyway.

I stood there with the figure in my head and the river wind and the closed pharmacy behind me and I thought about my sister's car that needed an engine I'd been pretending wasn't urgent. The lease renewal I'd been avoiding opening. The way I'd been eating lunch at my desk for six months because the café downstairs cost four dollars more than it used to.

"What's the catch?" I said.

"There are several."

"Tell me."

"Not over the phone, Miss Voss." Almost apologetic. "There's a meeting arranged for tomorrow. Ten o'clock. The address will come through shortly."

My phone buzzed against my ear.

Not a message from Harlan. Elliot's name on the screen, bright and familiar, the contact photo I'd taken of him laughing at something at the harbor last summer. I let it ring. It rang again. Then a message.

*Nora, please. Let me explain.*

I watched it sit there.

Another message.

*Don't go anywhere tonight.*

I read it twice. The specific strangeness of it — not *I'm sorry,* not *can we talk,* but *don't go anywhere* — landed somewhere between my ribs and wouldn't settle. It wasn't the language of a man trying to save a relationship. It was the language of a man managing a situation.

I put the phone in my purse and opened the browser instead and typed *Ashford Group* into the search bar with my thumb.

Standard results. Company history, board listings, the foundation's annual gala coverage. I scrolled. Then a business brief from four months ago — Ashford Logistics partnering with a mid-size freight consultancy to expand northern distribution. I almost kept scrolling.

I stopped.

The freight consultancy was Caine & Porter.

Elliot's company.

I read the paragraph three times. The partnership was described as preliminary, exploratory, two sentences in a longer article about regional logistics contracts. Small. Easy to miss. The kind of detail that lived in the middle of a page where no one looked.

Elliot had told me once — I couldn't remember when exactly, dinner somewhere, his hand around a wine glass — that he'd never worked with the Ashfords. That their operation was too large for his firm's scope. That he'd pitched them twice and been turned down both times.

My phone buzzed again.

Not Elliot this time. An unknown number — Harlan's, I assumed — with a single attachment.

A photograph.

Adrian Ashford. Not the one from the business column. This one was closer, candid, taken somewhere with high ceilings and natural light. He was looking slightly to the left of the camera, jaw set, one hand in his pocket. The kind of stillness that wasn't relaxed — the kind that was practiced.

I studied it longer than I meant to.

I didn't know him. I was certain of that. His face didn't pull at anything familiar.

But something about the photograph made the back of my neck feel the way it does before a storm, that low-pressure drop that the body registers before the mind catches up.

Harlan's next message came through beneath it.

*There is one more thing you should know.*

I waited.

*Mr. Ashford specifically requested you.*

The pharmacy sign buzzed once behind me. The river moved in the dark somewhere beyond the rooftops. Down the block, someone walked a dog that kept stopping to investigate the base of a lamppost, and the person waited each time with infinite, exhausted patience.

I looked at Adrian Ashford's photograph again.

A man who supposedly couldn't speak. Who couldn't manage his own care. Who had, according to Harlan, specifically requested me by name.

I put my phone away and started walking.

I didn't know where I was going yet. But I was walking faster than I had been before.