Proof,not comfort

( Marlowe)

I cried for exactly four minutes.

I want that number on the record too, the same way Jo would later insist on hers, because I think it matters that I allowed myself precisely that much, sitting on the stone wall by the greenhouse with Kael's words still settling into my chest, before something in me stood back up and started thinking again.

I'm not unstable. I never was.

It should have felt like enough, that sentence, spoken plainly by someone with no reason to lie to me. For four minutes, it was enough. Then the old part of me, the part that used to sit across from men twice my age and make them wait for an answer, surfaced through the relief with a colder, more useful question underneath it.

Now what.

Because knowing the truth and proving it to a room full of people who'd spent three years constructing the opposite story were two entirely different problems, and I'd learned that particular lesson the hard way, over and over, every time I'd handed someone a reasonable question and watched it get turned into evidence against me.

"I don't want comfort," I told Kael, once I'd gotten my voice steady again. "I want proof solid enough that nobody in this family can talk their way around it. Not Thorne. Not Beatrix. Not anyone."

"That's going to take time," he said carefully. "And it means not confronting anyone yet. Not until we have more than one lab result and a discrepancy in a calendar."

"I know how this works, Kael." Sharper than I meant it, though he didn't flinch. "I spent a decade building cases solid enough that nobody could pick them apart afterward. This isn't so different."

Something flickered across his face, no doubt, I realized, watching it land. Recognition. The look of a man watching someone step back into a version of herself he'd only heard described secondhand, until now.

We spent the rest of that afternoon in the east study, working through what we actually had and what we'd still need. The compound, confirmed independently. The calendar discrepancy on March fourteenth. The locked pantry tin nobody had ever explained to me. The wire transfer from the missing week, the unfamiliar number, the woman who'd known my name before I said it. Taken individually, each piece could be argued away. Together, laid out properly, they were starting to look like exactly what they were.

"I want to bring someone else in," I said, once we'd filled two pages of a legal pad with everything we could reconstruct. "Someone I trust completely, outside this house."

"Who?"

"Jo Vance. My oldest friend. She used to run a point on half my deals." I was already reaching for my phone as I said it, the first time in longer than I could remember that I'd felt something close to my old instinct for building a team around a problem instead of facing it alone. "She's been trying to reach me for weeks. Thorne's been intercepting the calls."

I opened my messages to find her name, already composing the first line in my head. I need to see you. It's important, don't tell anyone you heard from me and stopped with my thumb hovering over the screen.

There, near the top of the conversation, sat a message I had no memory of sending.

Sorry for going quiet, things have been a lot. I'll reach out when I'm feeling better. Please don't worry about me 

Sent two weeks ago. From my number, in a cadence that wasn't quite mine and yet something about it snagged at me the longer I stared. Things have been a lot.Not a phrase I use. It was Sable's, exactly Sable's, the specific worn little turn of speech she reached for whenever she wanted to sound overwhelmed and brave at once. I'd heard her say almost that exact sentence a dozen times over the years.

Whoever had written that message hadn't simply guessed at my voice. They'd borrowed my sister's.

I stared at it until the words blurred, my heart going hard and fast in my chest, and turned the phone toward Kael without a word.

He read it once, and his expression, when he looked back up at me, had gone very still.

"Marlowe." His voice was careful, deliberate, the tone of a man choosing his next words with real precision. "I don't think that phone is safe to use anymore. For anything."

"Then how am I supposed to reach her?"

He was quiet for a long moment, and when he finally answered, something in his voice had shifted into a register I hadn't heard from him before resolve, sharpened into something closer to a plan already forming.

"Not through anything connected to this house," he said. "We'll need another way in.”