He didn't tell Harper about the switch.Not yet.She had enough to carry.
His phone buzzed.
Ronan.Back tomorrow.Need to talk.6 p.m.your place.
"Ronan's coming tomorrow," he said."Six o'clock.Here."
Harper lowered her hands from her face."Good.We need more eyes on this.And Lila—his wife—she has access to the municipal records archive.If Victor Sattler's companies touched anything in Blossom Springs, she can find the paper trail."
"You've been thinking about this."
"I've been thinking about this since the day Marcus died."
She picked up her coffee, found it empty, and set it down again.Her eyes moved across the table—the documentation they'd assembled, the financial trail mapped out in Caleb's tight handwriting, the Marsh interview transcripts flagged with color-coded tabs she'd added that morning.
"We're actually doing this," she said.Not a question.A realization, settling into place the way a key fits a lock it was cut for.
"We're actually doing this."
She stood and carried her mug to the sink.Rinsed it, set it on the rack.Stood there for a moment with her back to him, her hands braced on the counter.
"Caleb."
"Yeah."
"Thank you.For calling Diana.For being up at four in the morning chasing corporate filings."She turned around."For not making me do this alone."
He wanted to tell her that she wouldn't be alone again.That as long as she was in this, he was in it beside her.But the words were bigger than the moment could hold, and he'd learned a long time ago that promises made in the middle of an operation had a way of dissolving when the operation ended.
So he said what was true and small enough to fit.
"You're not alone in this."
She looked at him from across the kitchen—six feet of tile and countertop and the careful distance they'd been maintaining since the morning she'd sat down at his table and started trusting him with pieces of her life.
"I know," she said quietly.
She came back to the table and picked up her pen.He pulled the laptop closer and opened the subsidiary map.Their shoulders were almost touching.The afternoon light moved through the kitchen window and across the floor, slow and warm, and neither of them mentioned it.
They worked until the light shifted from gold to gray and the surveillance feed showed the silver pickup departing Inlet Drive, replaced twenty minutes later by a dark sedan with tinted windows.Third vehicle.Third shift.
Caleb logged the transition and said nothing.Harper bent over the Geri Crane documentation, making notes in the margins with the focused intensity that had kept her alive and working through all those months of borrowed names and temporary addresses.
Outside, the sedan settled into position at the end of the road.Its driver did not know they were coming.
Chapter 12
Ronan Cross looked different than she remembered.
Harper had seen him once before—across the bakery at Mae's, three weeks ago, on the morning she'd arrived in Blossom Springs.He'd been sitting with Caleb at a corner table, his back to the wall, eating a scone like a man who had nowhere particular to be.She'd catalogued him the way she catalogued everyone: tall, dark hair, military bearing he'd stopped trying to hide.Wedding ring, new.Eyes that tracked movement the way Caleb's did—automatic, constant, and a little too sharp for a civilian.
The man who walked through Caleb's front door at ten minutes past six was the same man, but harder around the edges.Leaner.The easy posture from the bakery was gone, replaced by something wound tighter.He looked like a man who'd spent the past few weeks dealing with things that didn't have clean endings.
The woman beside him was a surprise.
Lila Cross was small—five-three, maybe five-four—with dark blond hair pulled back in a clip and the kind of face that looked younger than it probably was.She wore jeans and a light sweater, no jewelry except the wedding band, and she carried herself with a quiet steadiness that Harper recognized.It was the posture of someone who'd learned to stand in rooms where she wasn't expected and hold her ground.
"Harper Wynn," Ronan said."My wife, Lila."
