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The common room had gone dead silent.

I turned around. Bea had a hand pressed to her mouth. Indira’s arms had fallen to her sides. Austen was crying.

“It’s fake.” I pointed back to the screen. “It’s our video. I watched it and I didn’t realize.”

“Glitch.” Dutch, low.

Fuck. Wren was gone. She’d walked out the clubhouse door twenty-four hours ago, into the dark, alone, believing that every person who’d become her family had watched that video and agreed with me.

“I have to find her,” I said.

Nobody answered, and I didn’t wait for them to. I was already working the problem. It had been barely a day. Twenty-four hours since I’d stood in this room and told her to get out, told her I never wanted to see her lying face again, and watched her stop pleading with me.

But twenty-four hours was nothing—a head start I could erase before sunrise. Finding people was the one thing I was good at, and Wren wasn’t a professional. She was a hurt woman with a phone, a car and a bank card—all things I could easily track.

I’d have her by morning. I’d drive to wherever she’d gone to ground, get on my knees and apologize, and spend the rest of my life earning back what I broke. She’d rage at me. She’d be right to. But she loved me—I’d just watched the proof of it move across that screen. Love like that didn’t die in a day.

Chapter 4

❧

— Glitch —

One Year Later

A year is three hundred and sixty-five chances to find someone. I’d used every one of them.

I still watched the feeds because the club needed them watched. Work gave the day an order: clear the overnight alerts, keep an eye on the cameras, start again. The far wall was all Wren now. Printouts. Highway-camera stills. Transit schedules. A pinned photo of Wren laughing on a beach, red string running out from it to four hundred places she wasn’t.

I’d stopped sleeping more than four hours a night. I ate when Indira made me. I hadn’t had my bike out since spring. Eventually the brothers stopped telling me to take a break.

Three hundred and sixty-five chances.

I was the best in the country at this. I’d found men who’d spent fortunes disappearing. But I could not find one woman with a purse and a head start.

That night—after the room went quiet, after the video ran slow and I understood what I’d done—I went to our room to search for a trail.

I’d stood in the common room and watched her go, watched her leave without so much as a change of clothes, and she’d never returned for any of it. Her sweaters still hung in the closet. Her books were still stacked on her side. Her grandmother’s gray blanket was still folded over the arm of the chair. Her coffee mug still sat upside down in the rack where she’d left it to dry the morning of the day I threw her out. The circuit board still hung over our bed.

Her laptop was on the desk where she always left it.

The only thing she’d taken was her phone, because it had been in her purse.

I called it that night. The next morning. The morning after that, and every morning for a while, standing in a room that smelled a little less like her every week. It went straight to voicemail every single time. I pulled every trick I had—the pings, the towers, the back doors I’m not supposed to have—and got nothing.

I’d reconstructed her first hours the way I’d reconstruct a break-in. The bank first. She’d pulled cash to the daily limit that night, more the next morning. Then she went east.

The last time a camera saw Wren was 6:52 the next morning, at a gas station off the interstate two counties over. A grainy still of a woman in a gray hood paying cash at the pump.

The woman got into a car I couldn’t identify and merged onto the highway heading east, out of the state, out of my reach.

And then nothing.

Her card was never used again. The account sat untouched—I checked it every day anyway. Her name never surfaced. Not a lease. Not a utility hookup, not a new phone, not a paycheck reported to anybody, not a plate, not a clinic, not a parking ticket. Everybody leaves a trail. My whole life was built on that. Wren didn’t leave one.

There was a stretch, somewhere in the middle of it, when I made myself consider that she was dead.

I spent one full night looking for evidence that she’d died, then ruled it out. A death is the biggest trail there is. A body is a record. There’s no way to die that leaves nothing. If Wren were dead, I’d have found the paperwork that night.