Chapter 5 - The Wrong Home —
Dorian’s hand closed around his phone.
“Who told you?”
There was a pause, barely a second. “Adrian mentioned she might be trying. I assumed that explained the hospital.”
“Where is Adrian?”
“A conference, I think. Why?”
Dorian looked at me. I shook my head. Don’t give him anything else.
“I’ll call you back.”
After he hung up, June wrote down the words and the time. “An assumption isn’t proof of access to your result. But it tells us the story they’re using.”
By then my nausea had eased. Dr. Mercer discharged me with follow-up plans and clear instructions. I folded the ultrasound picture into my wallet where nobody could take it without asking.
“You can stay at the house,” Dorian said.
“No.”
He caught himself before arguing. “Where would you feel safe?”
The question unsettled me more than an order would have.
“Somewhere your finance director doesn’t manage.”
June arranged a room at a small hotel through her office. No family concierge. No company account. Noah would coordinate with hotel security, but only after I agreed to it.
Before we left, Mara asked to speak to me alone.
“I’m sorry about the text,” she said. “I knew it would scare you. I didn’t know whose side Dorian was on.”
“Neither did I.”
She rubbed a red mark where her wedding ring used to sit. “After they fired me, my husband believed them. By the time the licensing complaint was dismissed, he was gone.”
“Why didn’t you come sooner?”
“Because being brave once cost me everything. I needed a minute to do it again.”
I took her hand. Neither of us made a speech.
At the hotel, Dorian left a bag outside my room: bottled water, crackers, the sweater I’d forgotten at the hospital. He knocked, then stepped back.
“I’ll be downstairs if you need me.”
“I need you to tell me things before I have to drag them out of you.”
“I will.”
“That’s a promise. Don’t make it because it sounds good.”
He nodded and left.
Ten minutes later, Noah called. A man had entered the apartment building where I’d moved after the separation. He’d used a contractor’s access code and carried an empty document box.
“Building security stopped him at your door,” Noah said. “He said he was collecting records on your husband’s instructions.”
“Was he?”
“No.”
May you like
My stomach turned again.
“He had a work order,” Noah continued. “Signed with your name.”
