Sitting next to the oversized window, cradling her coffee in both hands, Lydia watched a young couple walking on the sidewalk. The young woman had long, lovely chestnut hair, whipping in the wind and occasionally striking her mate across the face. He didn’t even acknowledge it, and their easiness together led Lydia to believe that they must’ve known each other for a long time. She wondered what it would be like to know someone so well that their body became an extension of your own, their hair slapping you in the face a mere fact of your life and nothing so remarkable as to even comment on. She felt a hand on her shoulder and she looked up into Ethan’s curious, friendly face. Something in her chest squeezed tightly. In the few days they’d been here, she’d enjoyed nothing more than the warmth of his embrace, lying in the oversized bed cradled in his arms, the two of them creating a warm nest against the chilled wind blowing outside. She had hope- something that had been in

The house was a flurry of activity. The three bedrooms were full of people, with eight intimidating guards swapping shifts constantly and the others taking their rest as they needed to, sharing the beds of the two smaller suites. Lydia found herself retreating to her own room often in the first couple of days, hugging a pillow and staring out the window, missing Ethan terribly. She considered the insanity of her life, that she was a journalist being hunted like prey by a crazy malicious doctor and his family for a story she didn’t even get a chance to write the way she wanted to write it; that she was now sitting in the bed of a handsome, powerful millionaire in a foreign country, watching the world swim past the window, knowing that her sister was doing something similar somewhere else because they shared a face. But after the first couple of days, existing in a house full of polite but distant strangers no longer suited her, and she began to ask questions. She learned th

When she opened her eyes the first time, she was hanging upside down, and the car was a metal mass all around her. Inexplicably, she was wedged against one of the huge stones, the moss soft against her cheek as if the rock itself were cradling her body. She felt something warm dripping across her head, and she had just enough time to register the immense pain of her broken left arm before she blacked out again. When she opened her eyes the second time, she was in a sterile hospital room, monitors beeping unobtrusively next to her, Ethan’s head on the bed beside her hip. She didn’t wake him. She wiggled her toes and her fingers, noting the cast on her left arm and what felt like stitches on her fore head. She was sore and tired. Then, she remembered, and her hands flew to her stomach. Ethan’s head jerked up, and his sleepy but suddenly alert eyes found hers, relief washing over him. “Ethan,” she tried, her voice coming out in a choked whisper. She cl

She saw Huntington only once after his incarceration, choosing to change the channel any time his old case was brought up. She had no further desire to dig into his mind, no further need to know anything about him. In that one glance, she’d seen his plastic surgeries fail him. His skin sagged unnaturally, too smooth and tight across his cheekbones and too loose at his neck. His lips looked like empty bags, and his eyes sagged in his face. Gone was his youth, along with his license to practice medicine and his freedom or access to anyone he could harm. He was effectively pinned down, and though the thought pleased her tremendously, she couldn’t help but the feel that it wasn’t punishment enough. But then, nothing would be. But when she watched her daughter, she couldn’t be entirely bitter. Whatever the man had done was his sin to carry, and she chose to let go of her anger. She tried, and most days she succeeded, to not think of him at all. Sometimes, when Ethan got that ha