ログインTorres confirmed it the next morning.David Marsh had been on Mason's payroll throughout his employment at the firm — not the firm's payroll, Mason's personal one. A separate arrangement, a separate account, structured carefully enough to survive a casual audit. Torres had found it in forty minutes, which told Grace it had never been particularly well hidden. It had only needed to be hidden from people who were not looking.Emma had not been looking. She had been hoping.Grace sat across from Torres in the field office and listened to him lay out the full picture and thought about the difference between those two things. Between looking and hoping. She had spent seven years of her marriage hoping — that Mason was simply stressed, simply distracted, simply not quite as warm as she needed but trying. She understood exactly how hope could function as a blindfold."Marsh is being brought in this afternoon," Torres said. "He will give us Mason's communication channels — the phone, the inte
Grace did not tell Emma about the surveillance footage.Not yet. She needed Emma steady and present and she needed to think clearly, and the footage — which Torres had called about that same afternoon, two hours after Emma's confession — had the potential to unsteady all three of them if she introduced it at the wrong moment.So she waited.She sat in the kitchen that evening while Emma and Aiden talked in the living room, the television on low in the background, and she turned the information over in her mind the way she turned fabric samples when she was trying to find a seam. Looking for where the thing had been joined. Where the join might give.Torres had pulled surveillance records from three locations. He had cross-referenced the dates on which Mason seemed to have known things he should not have — Grace's plans, her movements, the specific details that kept appearing in Mason's responses as if he had been in the room when she said them.On three of those dates, Emma had been a
Grace called Rachel back before she had finished reading the text."What happened?" she said."Emma hasn't answered her phone since last night," Rachel said. Her voice was measured but Grace knew Rachel's measured voice well enough by now to hear the effort underneath it. "I called her at midnight when you were at Tessa Designs and she didn't pick up. I called her this morning three times. Nothing. I went to her flat an hour ago and she wasn't there.""Could she be with someone? Could she have—""I called Daniel. I called her sister. I called the coffee place she goes to every morning because Emma is a creature of habit and she has been ordering the same thing from the same place every day for two years." A pause. "She wasn't there."Grace was already moving down the corridor toward Aiden. She held up a hand and he straightened immediately."Has she been in contact with you at all? Any message, any—""Nothing since yesterday evening," Rachel said. "She sent me a voice note at eight PM
Jennifer arrived at the FBI field office at nine in the morning looking like someone who had not slept and had spent the hours she should have been sleeping convincing herself that coming in was the right thing to do.Grace was already there. She had been there since eight, in the same clothes as the night before, running on coffee and the particular clarity that arrived on the other side of exhaustion when your body gave up fighting and simply got on with things.Torres brought Jennifer into the small interview room and Grace sat across from her and looked at her properly. Jennifer had been her assistant for four years. She had stayed when the business accounts were frozen and the clients were cancelling and the media was printing things about Grace that were designed to make her look unstable. She had stayed through all of it without being asked to.Grace looked at her now and thought about that. About what it meant that the credit card was in her name. About the device in the offic
Torres called at two in the morning.Grace was still at Tessa Designs. She had sent Jennifer home an hour ago and told her to take the next two days and not argue about it. Jennifer had argued about it briefly and then gone. Aiden had stayed. He was in the small meeting room with his laptop and a look on his face that said he was doing something useful and she should let him be.She stepped into the empty corridor to take the call."The device," Torres said. No preamble. "We ran the serial number through the manufacturer database. It was purchased eleven months ago. Paid for with a credit card.""Name on the card," Grace said.Torres said the name.Grace stood very still in the corridor.The building was quiet around her. The forensics team had finished and gone. The only sounds were the distant hum of the city outside and, somewhere down the hall, the soft tap of Aiden's keyboard.She made herself hear the name again in her own head. Made herself hold it there and look at it. Made he
Tessa Designs was twenty minutes from the parking structure.Grace was out of the car before Torres had fully stopped talking in her earpiece. She heard Aiden behind her, heard Torres calling for a secondary unit to redirect, and she moved through all of it the way she had learned to move through chaos — not faster than she could think, but at exactly the speed of her thinking.Jennifer was outside on the pavement when they arrived, arms crossed tight over her chest, face pale in the cold night air. A security guard stood beside her. The building behind them had every light on, the way buildings look when something has happened inside them and everyone is afraid to turn anything off."They're gone," Jennifer said the moment Grace reached her. "All of it. The physical archive in your office, the backup drives in the cabinet behind your desk, the mood board wall. Everything you had on the spring collection. The folders going back to the beginning." Her voice was steady but her hands wer
Grace was reading on the couch when there was a knock on the door. Aiden opened it.A man stood there. Tall and expensive suit. Perfect smile."Aiden! There you are!" The man walked in without being invited. "I've been looking everywhere for you.""Derek. What are you doing here?""Business, my fri
Grace and Aiden spent the next day trying to salvage what they could. Calling people. Gathering replacement documents. Planning their next move.They were in Aiden's cabin. The resort had moved them after the fire.Grace was on her phone. Texting Rachel about setting up a press conference.Then her
Sophia woke up in pain. Sharp, stabbing pain in her stomach.She sat up fast. Felt wetness between her legs.Blood."No. No no no."She threw off the covers. The sheets were soaked. Red. So much red."Mason!" she screamed. "MASON!"He wasn't there. She was alone in the cabin.Sophia tried to stand.
The next morning, Grace went to the resort spa. She needed to clear her head. Think about her next move.She was in the sauna. Alone. Eyes closed. Breathing in the steam.The door opened.Grace opened her eyes.Sophia stood there. Wearing a white robe. Her face hard."We need to talk," Sophia said.







