로그인Chapter 63ANNALISAHe did not put music on, which told me he had assessed the quality of the silence I needed and had correctly identified it as the kind that should not be filled. He drove with the focused ease he brought to most things, one hand on the wheel, his eyes on the road, and I sat in the passenger seat and looked out the window and let the territory move past.The phone was in my bag.I could feel it buzzing intermittently even through the fabric.I did not take it out.The evidence was documented. The council process would resolve it. Those two sentences were the shape I was holding and I was going to keep holding it because the alternative was to let the notifications tell me how the story was being told and I was not going to be useful to anyone if I spent the drive home reading things I could not currently address.We stopped once.The fuel station was on the main road about eight minutes from the estate, a small practical sto
Chapter 62ANNALISAThe morning had been quiet.That was the thing I kept returning to afterward, the fact that it had started quietly, with Eli eating breakfast and the sun coming through the kitchen window and Dominic making coffee with the focused attention he gave everything, and nothing about that morning had announced what the rest of the day was going to be.I had a list.Things the estate needed, things I had been putting off during the preparation for the Greenwood visit and the visit itself and the three days of documentation and the drive home. Practical things. Food stores, a replacement lamp for the annex workspace, the particular brand of soap Eli had used since he was born and which the estate had run out of the previous week.Dominic had offered to come.I had said yes because saying no would have required a reason and I did not have one that was honest, and because the truth was that I did not particularly want to be alone in a public space in the current climate, eve
Chapter 61CHRISTIANAI thanked her and let the call end there because that was enough. I had planted the question in the mind of the person best positioned to ask it formally.The conflict of interest review would slow the process, make the council doubt whether anything filed by Annalisa Voss should be taken seriously. This alone would require additional documentation, before the panel reached its conclusions about whether to pursue the case seriously or brush it aside as a jealous woman misgivings.Time was what I needed.The secondary campaign was already moving by the time I finished the council calls.I had not started it myself. I had started it through three people who were connected enough to the regional network to seed a narrative without it being traceable back to me as the origin point. I made sure not to be tied back to any rumors generated by me, to make sure that I was innocent.Two of the women that I had chosen for the job of spreading the fake rumors- that Annali
Chapter 60CHRISTIANAI had been preparing for this since the morning after I used the vial.That was the part none of them had accounted for. They had built their documentation carefully, I did not doubt that, Annalisa was a precise woman who always did everything in increments making sure that she missed nothing out, that could either make or mar a case and Dominic Vael was not someone who filed things sloppily, but they had built it from the position of people who believed they were ahead of the situation, and they were going to pin me down.That they had found something, confirmed something, and were now moving to act on information that I did not know they had.They did not know that I had been watching.Not the testing. I had not known about the testing until the submission was already filed, which was a gap in my preparation that I had noted and accepted and moved past, because spending time on what I had not anticipated was not useful when there was still time to shape what c
Chapter 59ANNALISAEli went to bed at half past seven with the exhaustion of a child who had run hrough the entire garden and then had eaten dinner quickly, refueling what he had lost.I sat beside him until his breathing deepened and his hands went slack and the tension of the past three days began to release its grip on me properly for the first time.I pulled his blanket up and turned the lamp down and left the door slightly open the way he preferred.Dominic was at the table in the main room with his laptop open and two cups of tea already made, which was the domestic version of him that I found used to after long hours of the day, when he knew all I wanted to do was decompress for he night before sleeping.I sat down and wrapped my hands around the cup, as I took a big sip from it, as I said,"Thank you, I needed this." I said as he nodded his head."Of course Annalisa, you are welcome.""The compound," I said."Yes," he said.We had come back to it earlier in the evening, brief
Chapter 58ANNALISAWe pulled through the gates of the Vael estate at half past two in the afternoon.I saw Eli before the car had fully stopped.He was in Cora's arms on the front steps, which meant he had been watching for the car long enough that Cora had brought him outside to wait, and when the car came into view he began doing the thing he did when he was too excited for his body to contain it, a full-body movement that was not quite bouncing and not quite wriggling but was something in between that I had never seen any other child do and was entirely his own.The car stopped.I had the door open before Dominic had fully applied the handbrake, which he accepted without comment because he knew better than to comment on it.Eli was already reaching for me from Cora's arms.He came across the distance between us with the complete commitment of a child who had assessed the gap and decided that falling was an acceptable risk compared to the alternative of waiting another half second,







