Page 5 of Tracking Safety

On the surface, things between the two of them had seemed normal. Roderick hadn’t mentioned their conversation in the office again. Neither had she. He had, however, mysteriously found her passport that evening same evening. It had been in his office, he’d said.

They’d had dinner together most evenings, attended a gallery opening with friends, and spent a Sunday afternoon walking along the lakefront the way they used to when they were first married.

Roderick had been attentive. Thoughtful. He’d brought her flowers twice, remembered to ask about her patients, and he’d laughed at her stories.

His kindness frightened her the most. It was an unspoken reminder of everything she stood to lose if she made the wrong move.

She couldn’t forget what she’d seen in his file. Ignoring possible injustice went against her very nature. So she’d looked up names. Done her research.

And it was just as bad as she feared.

Her husband had a list of people who’d died or been killed.

Which indicated he may have been involved in their deaths.

One evening while Roderick was in the shower, she’d ventured to look at his phone. She hadn’t been able to get past his passcode. She’d tried every combination she could think of, but she’d gotten nowhere and had to stop before the phone locked up.

She’d put his cell back exactly where she’d found it, and she hadn’t tried again. The fear of being caught had outweighed the need to know.

However, she couldn’t stop thinking about those names and figures. Those surveillance photographs. The circled name beside a date.

Her husband was involved in something that destroyed people’s lives, wasn’t he?

And yet she kept making excuses, trying to find a plausible reason.

She’d built an elaborate scaffolding out of maybes, and she’d propped her daily life against it. Maybe she’d misread the figures. Maybe there was a legitimate explanation for the photographs that she simply didn’t understand. Maybe Roderick’s business operated in ways that looked suspicious on paper but were entirely aboveboard in practice.

But she found all that hard to believe.

She hadn’t told anyone about her discovery. Not her colleagues or friends.

She hadn’t uttered a word.

Because the alternative—accepting what her gut told her to be true—meant making decisions she wasn’t ready to make.

Meant doing something she wasn’t ready to do.

As she walked into the medical building where she worked as a physical therapist, Ellie tugged her lanyard over her head and gripped the coffee she’d picked up from a stand outside.

She checked the time on her watch.

Ten minutes until her first patient. She was usually earlier than this.

She couldn’t seem to get herself together lately. That file had turned her entire world upside down.

She stepped into the elevator and pressed the button for the fourth floor. Before the doors closed, a man in his mid-forties rushed inside. She stepped toward a wall to give him space.

He flashed her a smile and muttered, “Thanks.”

They both took the normal elevator stance and faced the front.

The elevator began to rise.

“Mrs. Barone.”

Ellie’s breath caught. He knew her name. How? She’d never seen this man before. She would remember if he’d been a patient.

She pressed closer to the elevator wall. The space suddenly felt too small, too confined, too . . . dangerous.