All Chapters of 37 Times You Called My Name : Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

Mia POVThe morning after Jake’s arrest, the house felt different. Quieter. Safer. But the quiet didn’t last.Ryder’s phone started buzzing before the coffee finished brewing. He stepped out onto the porch, voice low and clipped. When he came back in, his expression was set.“Jake didn’t work alone,” he said. “The police found three more numbers in his phone that match the payments from the documents you found. One of them is still active. They’re moving money right now.”My stomach tightened. I set the mug down harder than I meant to. “How many people?”“At least four that we can confirm. Maybe more. The network goes wider than the old hockey team. There’s a private investigator in another city who specialized in digging up dirt on rich kids’ families. And a woman who used to work security at the clinic where the pregnancy records were accessed. Jake paid them all.”I pushed myself up on the crutches. The cast felt heavier today. “Then we find them. All of them. I don’t want anyone l

Mia POVSleep didn’t come easy. Every time the house settled I woke up reaching for the crutches, certain someone was at the window. By 4 a.m. I gave up and limped into the kitchen. Ryder was already there, laptop open, the glow lighting the hard set of his face.“You’re not sleeping either,” I said.He glanced up. “Harlan sent the first batch of files from the shell company. Three more names. Two of them are local. One is not.”I lowered myself into the chair across from him and pulled the laptop closer. The screen showed bank transfers, dates stretching back almost six years. Payments that lined up with every major hit against me: the original rumors, the blocked job applications, the clinic access, the kidnapping, the car. Jake’s name appeared often, but so did two others I didn’t recognize—Marcus Hale and Elena Voss. The third name was only a set of initials: R.T.“Who’s R.T.?” I asked.Ryder’s jaw flexed. “That’s the problem. The trail stops there. The money comes from a trust t

Mia POVThe house felt smaller with all the extra security, but for the first time in days the fear loosened its grip just enough to let something else in. Ryder stayed close without hovering. When I reached for a glass he was already handing it to me. When the cast itched he noticed before I said a word and brought the small tool the doctor had given us. The thriller parts of our lives—the arrests, the warehouse full of photographs, the man on the island—still sat in the background like a low storm. But inside these walls we were starting to remember how to be two people who chose each other.That morning my mother announced she was going to the market with two of the security team. “You two need an hour without me in the middle,” she said, kissing my cheek. “Use it.”The door closed behind her. Silence settled. Ryder looked at me from across the kitchen, the same intensity he used for strategy meetings now focused entirely on me.“Come here,” he said softly.I hobbled over on the c

Mia POVThe first full day without the cast felt like learning to walk all over again. My leg was weak and pale, the skin itchy and strange, but it was mine. I spent the morning doing the physical-therapy exercises Ryder had set up in the living room while he answered emails on the couch, glancing up every few minutes like he was afraid I might tip over. I didn’t. I finished the set, wiped the sweat from my forehead, and collapsed beside him with a satisfied huff.“You’re staring again,” I said.“I’m cataloguing,” he answered, not looking away. “The way you grit your teeth on the hard ones. The way you smile when you finish. I’m allowed to stare. I earned it.”I leaned over and kissed the corner of his mouth. He turned into it, slow and unhurried, one hand sliding up the back of my neck. For a few minutes the only sound in the room was the quiet shift of fabric and the low hum of the refrigerator. When we pulled apart he rested his forehead against mine.“I have to go into the office

Mia POV The quiet stretched into a fourth day, then a fifth. No new messages. No new photographs. No sudden freezes of accounts or panicked calls from Harlan. The silence from Richard Thorne’s island felt deliberate, like a held breath. Ryder treated it as both victory and warning. The security team stayed at full strength. The perimeter checks continued. But inside the house the air had changed. We were no longer only surviving. We were practicing the ordinary life we kept talking about. My leg grew stronger every morning. I walked the full loop of the garden without stopping, then the driveway, then—on the sixth day—down the quiet street and back with only one security shadow trailing at a distance. When I returned, flushed and pleased with myself, Ryder was on the porch with coffee and a look that was half pride, half the old fear that something would snatch the progress away. “You’re going to outpace the security detail soon,” he said, handing me the mug. “That’s the ide